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Benchmarks are benchmarks and they need to be respected for what they are but nothing really captures the responsiveness and agility of the Barton system that is the reincarnation of what we used as comparison between the K6-III and the PII more than a few years ago. We then used the comparison between a high powered SUV (PII) vs. a two-stroke powered motorbike. They both are fast and there are instances where the P4 is definitely superior. But guess, which one is more fun?

The Athlon XP3000+ is not a cheap processor, in fact, at its debut it will run almost $600 in quanities of 1K. On the other hand, it turned out more powerful than we had expected or dreamed or even thought it would be possible to achieve with just an increase in cache size. Well, that is not really true, we did expect the performance increase that we found but it is nice to see it happen anyway.

As stated just above, every system feels different and the the performance difference between the Thoroughbred and the Barton core are not something that can be documented very easily in form of benchmarks. This is, in many ways, where the Business Winstones still have some value, despite the obvious question of "Who needs that anyway" because it is one of the benchmarks that capture the responsiveness of the system.

We could ramble on but I feel that there is really no need. From the benchmarks that we have run, it appears that it will take a GraniteBay system to beat the XP3000+ in the majority of applications, however, we also need to take into account that by the end of the day, there is no price difference left either. Then it comes down to a matter of taste again.

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