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Sysmark2000 is the older version of Sysmark which is not a multitasking suite but rather a sequence of isolated office and content creation applications. The operating system in this case is Windows 98SE. The point of showing these data is not to set absolute performance standards, rather to show that despite unchanged integer and FPU performance, the Northwood takes a giant leap ahead. This is not really surprising since office applications eat L2 cache for breakfast, that is, the more, the merrier. The new version of Sysmark (2001) has some political aspects to it that I don't like and, thus, I skip it.

It is pretty clear what is going on here: the Northwood outperforms the Willamette at the same clock speed by quite a margin. Keep in mind that the overall score is the arithmetic mean of the Office Productivity and the Internet Content Creation score

Time to Unleash Fido (er, AMD Athlon XP2000+)

Since the P4 already has a headstart in terms of coverage, I am not going to spend much time on the Athlon and the QuantiSpeed architecture which has been covered excessively elsewhere. The thing is, though, that in office applications, the AMD processors have always had an edge over the direct competition from Intel, keep that in mind when looking at the ContentCreation Winstone 2001 scores below. ContentCreation Winstone2001 is a multi-tasking benchmark where several applications are running simultaneously against each other.

ContentCreation Winstone 2001 (Win98SE)

Within the family P4 processors, the increased L2 size and the higher clock speed quite dramatically offset the Northwood from the Willamette. Still, the AMD Athlon XP 2000+ steals the high-score. One reason for the relatively low performance of the P4 is supposed to be the extra deep pipeline which is an invitation for page misses if applications are running from the cache as in the case of office and content creation programs. It does not so much appear to be the problem of a page miss here as rather a question of page expiration due to repetitive cache access.

Keep in mind here that the scores were obtained in Windows98 which makes them considerably lower than they would come out in WinNT, 2000, or XP (XP does not support CCWS, though).

Concluding (for this page) we can boldly state that there is a difference between synthetic CPU benchmarks and office applications, moreover, the two genres appear to be on the opposite end of the scale. The question remains: which one is more relevant for the consumer? (hint, my bet is almost on Sandra)

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