Product: Pentium 4 1.5GHz
Company: Intel
Website: http://www.intel.com
Estimated Street Price: $848.00
Review By: Julien JAY

BenchMarks' Results Analysis

As you can see, our various benchmark results aren’t as promising as the Pentium 4 CPU can be on the paper: if the Pentium 4 is hopefully always on top, most of the time it's only with a small advance that doesn't let people presume it's 500 Mhz faster than a Pentium III 1GHz. Apparently 500 MHz aren't enough to make the difference but this is due to various things: from the fact that actual benchmarking tools don’t take into play the specific Pentium 4 intrinsic characteristics and so don’t reveal its unbelievable new powerful capacities especially for high demanding multimedia operations like coding into MPEG 2, ripping, etc to the fact that no applications are yet SSE2 ready: the Pentium 4 is to our eyes like every good wine by taking age it'll become better & better especially when applications will exploit its capacities. It’s like evaluating a Ferrari on a small country road. In order to better understand this we have included an excellent point of view from the Linley Gwennap Group:

“Performance data for the recently released Pentium 4 shows the chip's unique characteristics, which will affect the way Intel markets the processor. In 1995, when Intel began designing Pentium 4 (aka Willamette), the first MMX chip had not been released. The designers realized, however, that by the time Willamette reached the market, MMX would spur demand for multimedia applications and that those applications would become key measures of PC performance. Indeed, now that Pentium III has reached 1 GHz, it has become clear that 1990s-style applications, such as word processors and spreadsheets, don't really benefit from faster CPUs. Just as 2-D Winmark became an obsolete metric once graphics chips could redraw the screen faster than the eye could see, benchmarks based on the old-style applications become meaningless for super-GHz CPUs. For that reason, Willamette's designers did not emphasize benchmarks, such as SysMark, that rely primarily on the older productivity applications. As a result, a 1.4-GHz Pentium 4 delivers the same SysMark 2000 performance as a 1-GHz Pentium III. But those applications don't need more performance. The applications that will tax PCs in the future are 3-D graphics, image manipulation, audio/video compression and voice recognition. Pentium 4 excels in these areas: On test after test, the new processor outruns Pentium III by 20 percent to 40 percent. The results should also put Pentium 4 ahead of Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon on most multimedia apps. Presciently, the Willamette team also focused on maximizing the clock speed of their processor. Pentium 4's ultralong pipeline should reach 2 GHz in Intel's 0.18-micron process, nearly doubling the top speed of Pentium III in the same process. Athlon will be hard-pressed to reach 1.5 GHz in a comparable process. Thus, Intel will emphasize Pentium 4's clock-speed advantage over Athlon and, for more sophisticated users, its advantage on multimedia applications. AMD will point to Athlon's superior performance on benchmarks like SysMark 2000. Intel undoubtedly wishes that Pentium 4 beat Athlon on SysMark 2000. But the designers made the right choice in emphasizing multimedia performance. As Intel's flagship PC processor for at least the next four years, Pentium 4 is designed to excel on tomorrow's software, not yesterday's.”