Desktop CPU Comparison - September 99

The benchmarks are represented both in a graph format and followed by a data table containing all scores in their entirety.  The processors that correspond to the bars in the graphs are as follows (from left to right):

AMD K6-2 300, AMD K6-2 333, AMD K6-2 350, AMD K6-2 400, AMD K6-2 450, AMD K6-2 475, AMD K6-III 450, Intel Celeron 333, Intel Celeron 366, Intel Celeron 400, Intel Celeron 433, Intel Celeron 466, Intel Celeron 500, Intel P2-300, Intel P2-333, Intel P2-350, Intel P2-400, Intel P3-450, Intel P3-500, Intel P3-550, Intel P3-600, AMD Athlon 600, and AMD Athlon 650.

The first benchmark out of the four Image Editing tests in our suite was provided by Intel in order to exhibit the performance "advantages" SSE offers, unfortunately this also renders the benchmark extremely biased towards the Pentium III (the four lowest bars on the chart).  If you ignore the Pentium III's performance, the benchmark grows in usefulness.  The Intel Celeron, clock for clock, beats the Pentium II which lacks the SSE optimizations that its newer brother does and therefore is put to rest by the full speed L2 cache of the Celeron.   The heavy emphasis on floating point calculations in this test keep the K6-X line out of the top scoring positions and while it may seem that since this is an Intel application the results were meant to appear that way, in actuality the weakness of the K6-X FPU will be a redundant point made by many benchmarks to come. 

The heavy SSE optimization keep the Athlon's power from truly shining, which ends up giving the Athlon a marginal lead over the lower clocked Pentium II processors.  And as mentioned before, the heavy SSE optimizations and SSE-tailored code keep the SSE enhanced Pentium IIIs at unreasonably high scoring levels in this benchmark.  This is the perfect example of a benchmark that isn't great for comparing all processors, but does a fine job of comparing processors within a single family.