AMD will lower their model ratings before Hammer launches to match better with the reality that is Northwood
Where do you get this malarkey? Benchmark comparisons of the 2000+ vs. the NW2200 show that the 2000+ is, if anything, conservatively rated. PC World even found that a 1900+ was faster than the NW 2200.
From PC World at pcworld.com
Good news, Intel fans: In our tests the latest version of the Pentium 4 CPU (formerly code-named Northwood) generally offers better performance than the old P4s, and in some cases delivers a significant boost. But our first system tests of machines using the new 2-GHz and 2.2-GHz Pentium 4 chips showed that an AMD Athlon XP 1900+ comparison system ran business applications faster and held its own on many multimedia apps.
...The MicronPC, equipped with AMD's Athlon XP 1900+ chip (which runs at 1.6 GHz) and 256MB of DDR SDRAM, posted a score of 119 on our PC WorldBench 4 test suite--that's 9 points higher than the Dell Dimension 8200, with a Pentium 4 2.2 GHz chip and 256MB of RDRAM. Though the difference in speed isn't huge (the MicronPC system performed 8 percent faster), you may notice it.
...The results on our graphics apps and multimedia tests were mixed. The MicronPC unit did best on our AutoCAD and Photoshop tests. It shaved 25 seconds off the Dell's time in AutoCAD, and it was about 10 seconds faster than the Dell on each Photoshop test. But the Dell took top honors on the multimedia tests, albeit by smaller margins: Its strongest score, on the Windows Media video test, was about 8 percent (5 seconds) faster than the MicronPC system's.
Software patches designed to exploit features in specific hardware may net you better performance. Adobe's patch for Photoshop is geared for P4 PCs, but in our tests it produced improvements on the Athlon XP unit too. We saw virtually identical results on our multiple filters test, which stresses integer functions, but on our floating-point-intensive lighting effects test, the scores for the P4-based PCs improved by about 8 percent.
Petz |
