In conclusion the results of the synthetic PCMark2002 test:

Conclusion

AMD once again managed to speed up its processors without any significant core frequency increase. This time the company resorted to the trick that has already stood all tests of time: they increased the bus frequency from 333MHz to 400MHz. As you can see, it worked. The new Athlon XP 3200+ looks pretty competitive against the background of the new Pentium 4 3.0GHz with 800MHz bus.

The freshly launched Pentium 4 3.0GHz with 800MHz bus used to outperform Athlon XP in most tests, however, the announcement of the new Athlon XP 3200+ leveled out the chances. Athlon XP 3200+ is the fastest CPU for games, business applications and professional OpenGL tasks, while Pentium 4 retains the leadership in digital content creation applications, streaming data processing tasks and 3D rendering.

Nevertheless, it looks as if the upcoming announcement of the new Pentium 4 3.2GHz in June could turn the scale in Intel’s favor again, unless AMD introduces faster CPUs. And after that we will be waiting for the new competition round between AMD Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 Prescott.