Athlon XP vs Pentium 4 @ THG

Tom's Hardware Guide har testet de hurtigste processorer på markedet i dag, og konklusionen er ikke overraskende at Athlon XP 1800+ er den hurtigste, men der er dog flere overraskelser, blandt andet viser de en Athlon XP, som de påstår er en ny version, men da de har sløret selve kernen, kan vi ikke være sikre. Rart er det dog at se at Athlon XP nu virkelig deler øretæver ud i DivX, en Athlon XP 1600+ (1400 MHz) er faktisk lidt hurtigere end en Pentium 4 2000 MHz. Til gengæld oplevede Tom's Hardware at Athlon (XP) platformen var lidt ustabil, et problem vi ikke har oplevet i vores tests af Athlon XP, og derfor er vi ret sikre på at det er et software-problem. Her er et udsnit fra testen:

We've got our performance winner in this extensive CPU test - the AMD Athlon XP 1800+ tops the Intel Pentium 4/2000 in most of the applications benchmarks we selected. The Athlon XP's strengths really lie with 3D games that use DirectX 7 or DirectX 8.

Even in MP3 audio encoding, the fastest Athlon XP was a nose faster that the faster clocked Pentium 4 processors. We were in for a surprise with the new MPEG-4-Codec DivX 4.02.1: when used together with Flask Mpeg 0.6, the Athlon XP 1800+ (clocked at 1533 MHZ) knocked the stuffing out of the Pentium 4, clocked at 2000 MHz. This is a watershed in CPU comparisons between AMD and Intel. Although the benchmarks favor AMD over Intel presently things can, and will change. A new version of the DivX codec or Flask Mpeg, can change the picture again. Higher performance gains can be had on either processor. "

Læs testen her: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q4/011031/index.html