Now let’s take a look at the results shown by other testing participants:

Well, Athlon 64 doesn’t surpass dual-channel i875P with 800MHz bus, but beats nForce2 even despite the single memory channel available.

Now let’s have a look at the “pure” performance of different Athlon 64 units. The benchmark from SiSoft Sandra 2003 test set allows us to do it. The results provided by the measuring units of this test package do not depend on the L2 cache or memory subsystem performance.

There is something to think of here. Take, for instance, ALU performance in Athlon 64, which has got 8% higher than that of the Athlon XP ALU, according to this test. This improvement was possible due to improved branch prediction and TLB. However, this is far not enough for successful competition with Intel Pentium 4, where ALU works at doubled frequency. As for the FPU performance, this unit remained unchanged that is why the performance is also the same as by Athlon XP. And this is more than enough to defeat Intel Pentium 4 2.8C, despite the support of Hyper-Threading technology. Well, the FPU unit of Athlon processors was made very powerful from the very beginning. As far as SSE2 unit of Athlon 64 is concerned, it turned out a disappointment. Our Athlon 64 fell quite far even behind Pentium 4 2.53GHz.

Will Athlon 64 2800+ be able to perform at least as fast as Athlon XP 2800+?

Well, it looks as if it could. Although a lot will depend on each particular task. The low clock frequency of Athlon 64 2800+ (1.6GHz) pushes it behind Athlon XP 2800+ working at 2.083GHz in terms of computational power. However, as soon as it comes to operations with the memory, Athlon 64 manages to get ahead.

Now let’s check the situation in real applications.

The complex Business Winstone 2002 test set illustrating the average performance in typical office applications, showed that the good old Athlon XP 2800+ was about 8.5% faster than the new Athlon 64 2800+. The only reason for this situation is the 30% higher working frequency of the Athlon XP 2800+ processor. Unfortunately, neither the huge cache, nor the fast memory subsystem of Athlon 64 help this processor to make up for lower core clock. At the same time, Athlon 64 2800+ outperforms Athlon XP 1.6GHz by the same 8%.