Benchmarks Analysis

   Logically the Pentium 4 2.4 GHz is the most powerful processor and thus it surpasses every other platform, including AMD’s Athlon XP. It’s a fact the Pentium 4 2.4 GHz blows away every other CPU in most of the tests. However you'll notice that the AMD Athlon XP 2000+, running in fact at 1666 MHz (marketing...), gets honorable scores when facing a processor that is 733 MHz faster. AMD's processor even manages to beat the Pentium 4 2.4GHz in some tests like CPUMark 99 & CPUMathMark 3.0: those tests use old basic instructions and are not optimized for the advanced architecture of the Pentium 4 thus outlining the conception's difference between AMD & Intel CPUs where too much pipelines can decrease performances. It's clear that the AMD Ahtlon XP and Intel Pentium 4 have radically different architectures that cannot be evaluated with the classic MHz figures: each processor has its specifities and thus a favorite field of application. Our tests highlight the fact the Intel Pentium 4 CPU was clearly conceived for multimedia applications since the Pentium 4 2.4GHz gives way better results than AMD's Athlon XP 2000+ with 3D games and multimedia applications. Concerning the memory, the Rambus technology still rules. Below are the memory system performance results given by MadOnion PCMark 2002 for the Pentium 4 2.4GHz/Rambus and the AMD Athlon XP 2000+/DDR (both systems were using 256MB of memory):

The results of the Pentium 4 2.0A GHz demonstrates the importance of having more cache memory since at equal frequency it always outperforms the Pentium 4 2 GHz. More interesting is the fact that results from games like Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament seem to reach their ceiling: at a certain moment the brut frequency of the CPU doesn’t help to significantly enhance the results anymore since the code of these programs is old and not optimised for the Pentium 4. Some benchmarks like CPUMathMark 3 and SiSoft 2002 highlight the fact they don’t take in account the quality of the memory attached to the processor. 

If you’ve carefully looked at the results given by Ziff Davis benchmarks you have obviously seen the Pentium 4 2.2 GHz is shortly ahead in comparison of the Pentium 4 2.0A GHz and that we didn't publish the 3D WinBench 2000 test. This is due to the fact there’s a major bug in the code of Ziff Davis benchmarks that appears only with 2.2GHz and faster CPUs: ZD’s poorly written code clogged up the Pentium 4 pipeline resulting in random errors and abnormally low results. Ziff Davis has confirmed this to be a bug in their software, but so far no patch is available. 

If most actual benchmarking tools now take into play the specific Pentium 4 intrinsic characteristics, they’re not focused enough on what the Pentium 4 does the best: multimedia. Indeed while the Pentium III platform is an all-terrain one the Pentium 4 has been designed for high demanding multimedia applications and 3D games. The Pentium 4 is the ultimate solution to enjoy high speed times when using high-end multimedia applications that code into MPEG 2, rip into WMA or MP3, mount videos, add special effects to videos, etc.