Date:
Monday , February 10, 2003
Author:
Kyle Bennett
Editor:
Steve Lynch
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AMD's Barton @ 3000+

AMD has a new flagship CPU that is launched today and it seems to be not just on paper. Let's find out what punch the Barton packs compared to the Pentium 4 3GHz and its older brother the Thoroughbred.

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Test Setup

ASUS A7N8X (nForce2): AMD AthlonXP 3000+ CPU (clocked at 13x166); 2 x 256MB Kingston HyperX PC3500; ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, onboard nForce2 10/100 NIC; 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Vantec 550w PSU. WindowsXP w/SP1, ATi Catalyst 6178. NVIDIA NF 2.0 chipset drivers.

Gigabyte GA-8PE667 (i845PE): Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz CPU (clocked at 23x133 - HyperThreading Enabled); 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3200; ATI Radeon 9700 Pro; 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Vantec 550w PSU. WindowsXP w/SP1, ATi Catalyst 6178. Intel v4.10 chipset drivers.

We have chosen to do this a bit differently than we have in the past. Our first section of benchmarks will face off the two flagship CPUs from AMD and Intel.

Application Benchmarks

Business Winstone 2001 & 2002

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The AthlonXP's high IPC and shallow pipeline have traditionally given it a lead in our Winston Biz benchmarks and this of course seems to still be the case. The Barton more than earns its rating in these two benchmarks and by 30% on the recent benchmark is very impressive.

Content Creation Winstone 2002 & 2003

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I was actually a bit surprised by the Barton's strong showing in these two sets. Of course what is obvious, is the loss by over 10% in the more current benchmark. Traditionally CC benchmarks have like the Pentium 4 solution due to the subsystem being able to better utilize raw memory bandwidth which still will come into play somewhat. I think that better coding for HyperThreading and more specifically SSE2 are more responsible for the Pentium 4 win in the second set of numbers.

SysMark 2002

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Office Productivity seems to be neck and neck for the most part, but as in our current Winstone benchmark, Content Creation still very much favors the Pentium 4 and the way it does things.