Review- AMD Athlon XP 2000+ vs. Intel Pentium 4 Northwood
Techware Labs gratefully recognizes AMD's support in making this review possible!
Review by Edward Chang, call sign: Big_E
May 7, 2002
SiSoft Sandra 2002
The Athlon XP 2000+ has an overwhelming lead in ALU performance. At default speed, the XP 2000+ also has a significant lead over the Northwood 1.6A in terms of Whetstone. Only when the Northwood 1.6A is overclocked to 2.0A, does it beat the XP by a small margin in FPU performance.
(Please note the Intel Pentium 4 results in these shots in comparison to our results)
The P4 1.6A has a 4.4% lead in ALU bandwidth over the Athlon XP 2000+. This time, the P4 1.6A takes a commanding lead over the both Athlon XPs. In both tests, the Northwood running at 2.0A scores lower due to the sychronization of the memory speed to the 124 MHz Front Side Bus, where as at the default 1.6 GHz, the memory is running at 133 MHz (Host Clock + 33 MHz). Thus, the overclocked Northwood is not an accurate gauge of actual memory performance. The Intel Pentium4 processors are known for their excellent memory handling. This appears to be the only obvious benefit of the Intel Quad-Pump Technology found on the Northwoods.
PCMark2002
This shows quite a trade off. Both AMD and Intel processors lose of their gains. The degraded Hard Drive performance on the Intel system is perplexing. We repeated this test several times, with the same results. The System scores indicate that PCMark2002 perhaps places emphasis on memory, in addition to processing power. Hence allowing for the Intel Northwoods to acquire such a lead over the AMD Athlon XP 2000+.
Video2000
In the Data Transfer Performance test, the AMD Athlon XP 2000+ and Northwood P4 @ 2.0A are almost equivalent, but the Intel has the slight edge. The picture differs when it comes down to encoding MPEG2, where the AMD Athlon XP shines.
