The scores show an interesting picture. The idea of the article was to test the new ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, but they were able to get an Athlon up to 2.49GHz for comparison. Given the nearly clock-for-clock comparison with the Pentium 4 (actually, the Pentium 4 has a 48MHz advantage, but the comparison is close), I would have expected much higher scores from the Athlon. However, it seems that at higher clock speeds, the Pentium 4 is able to keep up much better with the Athlon than it has in the past.
I think we've seen this before where Athlon simply doesn't scale well, even with a faster memory interface. I don't remember where I saw this, it was a few months ago.
it seems that a faster front side bus, more cache, and higher frequencies allow the Pentium 4 to finally hold its own against an equally clocked Athlon. At the end of the day, therefore, I would expect the Pentium 4 architecture to provide much higher frequencies overall, thus offering higher performance overall.
Isn't this what Intel has been saying all along?
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