<font color=red>Athlon 2600+ benchmarks
extremetech.com
tomshardware.com
IMO, the Athlon hardly deserves the model number. Things are beginning to get a little ridiculous, since even at 2.13GHz, it simply cannot manage to outperform the Pentium 4 at 2.53GHz. Why a larger model number if it cannot outperform??
In the Tom's Hardware review, Intel continues to lead in Quake III, 3DMark 2001, Comanche 4, MP3 Maker Platinum, FlasK 4.5, Pinnacle Studio 7, SysMark 2002, WinACE 2.11, Lightwave 7.5, and 3D Studio MAX 4.26 SP1. Even if you don't agree with some of the benchmarks, there are enough there for all disciplines. How can Tom's Hardware conclude that AMD won back the performance race? Because they won in 3DMark 2000, LAME 3.92, and Cinema 4D XL 7? The synthetic tests seem to go both ways, depending on whether the test is memory bound or cache bound, but the Pentium 4 certainly wins in 10/13 mainstream benchmarks and applications.
Overall, the Athlon is behind. It is close, but the number of applications optimized for the Pentium 4 is clearly able to outgrow whatever frequency improvements inside the Athlon. They need to get to the 333MHz bus interface and 512KB L2 cache based Barton core to improve on the memory hierarchy. The current Thoroughbred, despite the improvements, just doesn't cut it.
In terms of overclocking, the Athlon does exceedingly well, according to Tom's, reaching a very high 2.88GHz (though the fastest available for testing was 2.66GHz). But in its current form, megahertz improvements don't do much for performance scalability. The Pentium 4 2.53GHz manages to outperform the 2.66GHz overclocked Athlon with 333MHz bus interface and DDR333 memory in several tests. These include Quake III "Demo 1" (but not "NV15Demo"), SysMark 2002, WinACE 2.2, and Lightwave 7.5. The two CPUs tied in 3DMark 2001 and MP3 Maker Platinum.
That goes to show that the IPC improvements given to the Pentium 4 through several improvements in the micro-architecture have allowed it to exceed the Athlon's in some cases. These are among the most optimized of applications, but truly, what's to stop Intel from optimizing more? The Netburst micro-architecture will be around for a long time, so software developers have a reason to update their applications. Applications continue to get updated all the time, with favor slowly shifting towards Intel. With these applications, AMD's model numbers tend to exaggerate more and more.
Intel has proven themselves, and next week, according to rumors, there will be 2.8GHz Pentium 4 chips that will exceed anything that AMD has by a long shot. We've seen what a faster front side bus and higher megahertz can do, and it isn't much, according to the benchmarks. Will extra cache help? It's a possibility, but until then, Intel seems to have a solid performance lead, no matter what AMD's bogus model numbers seem to indicate.
Just my honest opinion and observation. Some will disagree, but that's just how I see it. Ultimately, the market will decide.
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