Re: Scumbria, remember when the Pentium Pro had lousy performance on 16-bit apps? Boy, did that shortcoming turn into big opportunities for AMD and Cyrix to cash-in on!
Neither Cyrix nor AMD had anything better than Pentium MMX at that time. And the Pentium Pro was pretty much a failure. The Pentium II, which performed much better on legacy software, was what successfully replaced the Pentium MMX. Relatively few people were interested in the Pentium PRO.
The relevant benchmark here would appear to be Sysmark 2000:
SYSmark 2000 contains twelve application workloads and a "workload manager" application responsible for setting up the workloads, timing their execution, and reporting performance results. Each SYSmark 2000 workload consists of a real application (for example, Adobe Photoshop) and a test script that sends commands to the application.
The workloads are divided into two categories. The Office Productivity category contains CorelDRAW* 9, Microsoft* Excel* 2000, Dragon Systems* NaturallySpeaking* Preferred 4.0, Netscape* Communicator* 4.61, Corel* Paradox* 9, Microsoft* PowerPoint* 2000, and Microsoft* Word* 2000. The Internet Content Creation category contains MetaCreations* Bryce* 4, Avid* Elastic Reality* 3.1, Adobe* Photoshop* 5.5, Adobe* Premiere* 5.1, and Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 4.0.
bapco.com
and here are the comparative scores:
Benchmark P4 1.6 P4 1.5 P4 1.4 K7 1.2 (DDR) K7 1.2 (PC133)
SYSMark 2000 (W98) 193 185 177 220 205
SYSMark 2000 (W2K) 217 208 199 232 221
This isn't good news for P4. The P4s tested used a more expensive dual memory channel motherboard with twice as much memory each byte of which cost twice as much. To achieve this uninspiring performance required that 4 times as much money be spent buying memory. It was the fastest RDRAM (PC800) but not the fastest DDR (which would have been CAS 2).
Benchmark systems:
- Pentium 4: 1.5 GHz (over- and underclockable to 1.4 - 1.6 GHz), Intel i850 reference board (boards from Asus made no difference), 256 MB PC800 RDRAM (under Win98 limited to 128 MB, but not under Win2000), Asus 77000 GeForce 2 GS with Detonator 3 v6.31, DirectX 8.0 Beta 219
- Athlon (DDR): 1.2 GHz, 128 MB PC2100 DDR RAM CS2.5, AMD760 reference board, Asus 77000 GeForce 2 GS with Detonator 3 v6.31, DirectX 8.0 Beta 219
- Athlon (SDR): 1.2 GHz, 128 MB PC133 SDRRAM CS3, Asus A7V motherboard, Asus 77000 GeForce 2 GS with Detonator 3 v6.31, DirectX 8.0 Beta 219
Dan
PS - By the way, if you had anything to do with the chipset, congratulations. Every analysis I've seen calls the chipset phenomenal and the CPU, well, not phenomenal. There are some benchmarks where the systems look good, and they are all benchmarks where the main factor is the chipset rather than the CPU. |
