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We were using a 50 MB AVI file ( 2.12 min runtime) that was rendered into MPEG format. MediaStudio Pro is about the most powerful video editing software on the market and savings of a few seconds can add up to hours for home video making.

Runtime in seconds, shorter is better. Again, the Northwood is substantially faster than the Willamette but no match for the XP 2000+

Caligari TrueSpace5.1

The pet-toy of most home and semiprofessional ray tracers. We were using the "Vase Scene" (courtesy of Adam Trachtenberg). Runtime is given in seconds.

Ray tracing largely depends on FPU power and therefore, it is not too surprising that the XP2000+ takes the lead.

Time to wrap up Windows98SE and to move on to Microsoft's most recent operating system a.k.a. WindowsXP. My personal bottom line is that here is a missed window of opportunity. We know that the Northwood has been in production since May last year and if it had been released immediately, there would not have been any doubt who has the fastest CPU on the market. Unfortunately for Intel, holding it back has given AMD the chance to come out with higher speedgrades of the Athlon and further to revise the core to enable SSE instructions that, in conjuction with enhanced prefetch and better TLBs boost the performance of the Palomino by up to 90% over the Thunderbird core. It's not over yet, though, Windows XP may tell a different story.

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