AMD Athlon

Business Application Performance

Business Winstone 99 has become an unspoken requirement for benchmarking here at AnandTech, and as you can see below, the Athlon simply dominates over the Pentium III.  Even when clocked at 650MHz, the Pentium III has a bit of climbing to do before it can even reach the Athlon at 600MHz, being around 5% slower although it boasts a 50MHz clock speed advantage.  Only the Athlon at 500MHz would be slower than the 650, with the 550MHz Athlon being about on par with the Pentium III 650. 

Intel's supplied us with a Microsoft Netshow Encoder benchmark that is supposed to take advantage of Intel's SSE.  Even with the optimizations for the Pentium III's SSE instructions, the Athlon 650 and 600 still beat out their equivalently clocked Intel counterparts.  It's funny to note that AMD also provided us with a Netshow benchmark, under which both Athlon processors dominated the score boards.  It just goes to show you that with extreme optimizations, you can prove the Athlon slower or faster than the Pentium III.  But in reality which is it?  The Athlon is definitely not slower than the Pentium III, but the advantage it holds over the Pentium III varies depending on the application.

Once again, both Intel and AMD provided us with an Adobe Photoshop benchmark, the results?  The Intel benchmark showed that the Pentium III was faster than the Athlon, and the AMD benchmark showed the exact opposite.  How meaningful are the Photoshop benchmarks as well as others provided by either of the two CPU manufacturers?  It depends on the level of SSE or 3DNow! optimizations present in the benchmark, the Photoshop benchmark below is obviously SSE optimized and AMD's Photoshop benchmark is obviously optimized for the Athlon so neither benchmark makes a good real world gauge of how fast the processors are.  

The best measure of application performance still seems to be Winstone which makes no use of SSE or 3DNow! specific optimizations.  The Photoshop benchmark is meaningless, regardless of whether it is the AMD or Intel version and unfortunately most benchmarks supplied by AMD and Intel carry the same biased optimizations.  It is interesting to see the Athlon beat the Pentium III in an application specifically optimized for the Pentium III such as in the Netshow Encoder benchmark.  At the same time, the Pentium III never beat the Athlon in a benchmark that was supposed to be optimized for the Athlon. 

In terms of raw power, the Athlon is the faster chip, and in real world usage, our money is on the Athlon.