PCMark04, on the contrary, indicates dramatic lag of the AMD processors behind the Pentium 4 rivals. Frankly speaking, I even suspected this test to be optimized for Pentium 4 architecture, because the lag of all Athlon 64 processors even behind Pentium 4 3.0GHz was too evident. However, the obtained results can be easily explained. Have a look at a little bit more detailed PCMark04 performance table for Pentium 4 3.2GHz and Athlon 64 2300+:

Athlon 64 falls behind the Pentium processor in the first 6 subtests, because of their multi-threaded nature. Here PCMark04 starts two computational threads synchronously. In this case Pentium 4 is evidently in a better situation due to Hyper-Threading technology, which allows optimal processing of two data streams simultaneously.

As for the second part of the subtests, they mostly deal with streaming data encoding, and this is exactly the type of applications where Pentium 4 is initially much faster. The advantages of Athlon 64 during physical modeling and spell-checking are definitely not enough to make up for the victory of Pentium 4 processor in other subtests.

This way, PCMark04 is a pretty fair test, since it doesn’t use any specific optimizations for Pentium 4 architecture. However, all in all, its structure will always favor Pentium 4, so that it becomes an indisputable leader anyway. This is how the list of selected applications and their order affect the performance of our testing participants in PCMark04.