Benchmark - Athlon 1.2GHz DDR, P4 1.5GHz, PIII 1GHz, and Dual PIII 1GHz...

[NOX]

Well, this is very interesting, actually the Athlon 1.2GHz w/ DDR SDRAM does very well against a PIII dually, and I can just imagine how much better it'll perform when SMP is available for the Athlon. But the dual PIII system rocks. Check out these benchmarks: InQuest Market Research

 

[Valnir]

When did the P3 1ghz become SMP enabled?? Last time I heard Smp was a no-go on the 1ghz P3.

But yea I can not wait for a Dual Palomino solution, hehe

 

[Finality]

Thats Intels official position on the cpu doesn't mean its not possible.

 

[Modus]

Those Inquest guys do hardware reviewing better than some hardware reviewers.

Still, they included a few questionable benchmarks; any test that is designed to show gains under a certain hardware configuration (ie. SSE or Dual Processors or whatever) is going to skew people's perception of real world performance. 3D Studio benchmarks are OK because that application will always make use of SMP if it's available, but the Office Bench test assumes an arbitrarilty heavy foreground/background usage pattern that may not be typical for even the most demanding power users.

Modus

 

[music10k]

These guys are basically saying what apple has been saying for a LONG time now and x86 users have scoffed at.. Kinda reminds me of the old RISC vs CISC days...


Heres a Quote For Lazy People:


<<
Summary
The range of applications we have evaluated here suggests that SMP capability could have a valuable performance impact for many Windows 2000 power users. Without doubt we will continue to find other applications of interest to professionals and consumers that respond favorably to the existence of a second CPU.

Under such SMP friendly circumstances, a fast single processor P4 cannot really stand up to a comparison with a Dual P3 or Dual Athlon platform. Merely raising the clock speed of the P4 a few more notches cannot compensate for the performance deltas we have seen in this project.

We expect that as hardware reviewers upgrade their benchmarking tools and methodologies, and as users begin to identify the potential advantages of SMP, that more platform solutions will become available for high end and even mid-range markets. Already numerous new platforms are on the way for P3 and Athlon that make use of PC133, VC133 and DDR SDRAM. >>

 

[Modus]

Now don't go interpreting this as a huge victory for SMP. It remains a costly, uncertain endeavor for boosting performance, because there is no way to know how well past and future applications will take advantage of it. Only professional 3D rendering apps seem at all interesting, and even there, the performance delta is not nearly what it theoretically should be for a CPU limitted process.

This new Office Bench test smells a lot like Bapco Webmark 2001: a benchmark engineered to ensure that a certain technology appears to achieve the performance gains it is supposed to achieve. In the case of Webmark, the test (which consists of &quot;Internet applications&quot; or office applications by any other name where the P4 has been proved weak) is tailored to make the Pentium 4 look better, even clock-for-clock better, than the Athlon or P3. And in the case of Office Bench, it is deliberately written to illustrate the performance benefits of SMP. If that's not synthetic, what is?

No, doubling the clock speed is always more powerful than doubling the chips. And given the sad state of their expensive, proprietary, poorly performing technology, Motorola/Apple don't deserve to mentioned in the same breath as AMD or Intel.

Modus

 

[NOX]

Not all SMP configurations are expansive; I built mine for under $800. I think it does have it?s advantages depending on the type of software you use, and besides Win2k takes full advantage of SMP.

I have done a few inquisitive benchmarks myself on my own personal system.

Sandra2000:

CPU Bench

CPU Multimedia Bench