The past week gave a new stimulus to the competition between the two microprocessor giants: AMD and Intel. Despite the fact that AMD processors occupy a much smaller market share than Intel processors, the technological leadership can hardly be assigned to any of them that easily. Nevertheless, exactly after the shift of the Pentium 4 family to a new 0.13micron Northwood core, the latter managed to get slightly ahead, which gave the Intel Company every right to call themselves the manufacturer of the fastest x86 CPUs. Not so long ago the working frequency of the fastest Pentium 4 processor equaled 2.53GHz. AMD on its part introduced only Athlon XP 2200+ as an opposition to the competing solution from Intel. Of course, the Pentium 4 proved to be faster in terms of performance, which we have already mentioned in our AMD Athlon XP 2600+ CPU Review. This state of things in the processor market could have lasted somewhat longer. Intel was going to increase the core frequencies of its Pentium 4 processors, so that Athlon XP CPUs were falling more and more behind.

However, last week brought some drastic changes to this state of things. Within the celebration of the 3rd anniversary of Athlon CPUs, AMD suddenly announced two new models of its Athlon XPs: Athlon XP 2400+ and Athlon XP 2600+. This move allowed the company to become the technology leader, at least for a couple of days. And today Intel made its announcement: the company managed to return the laurels they lost a few days ago by launching a new Pentium 4 processor working at 2.8GHz.

This way, the fastest processors in the competing families have now become Athlon XP 2600+ and Pentium 4 2.8GHz. And before we pass over to the actual comparison, which is in fact the topic of our today's article, we would like to point out one thing. Although AMD announced Athlon XP 2400+ and Athlon XP 2600+ officially, this turned out to be a kind of paper announcement, actually. Remembering the last years' experience, when AMD and Intel announced their new products at the time when they started sampling, and not at the beginning of mass sales, AMD promised to begin shipping new processors only in September. At the same time, the new Pentium 4 2.8GHz is already selling. That is why, please, bear in mind that our comparison of Athlon XP 2600+ and Pentium 4 2.8GHz is composed with a grain of craftiness. However, by the time the new Athlon XP reaches the stores, Intel will hardly come up with anything new.

New Athlon XP CPUs

The launching of new Athlon XP 2400+ and Athlon XP 2600+ is a remarkable event for several reasons. Firstly, the announcement of these processors pushed AMD to change the calculation algorithm for their performance rating. Secondly, new Athlon XP CPUs are based on a slightly modified Thoroughbred core with Stepping equal to 1, while the previous Athlon XP 2200+ used 0 core stepping. And thirdly, Athlon XP 2400+ and Athlon XP 2600+ are very likely to be the last Athlon XP processors intended for 266MHz bus. Let's dwell on these peculiarities a bit more.

The major rule AMD stuck to when calculating the processor ratings used to mark its CPUs seemed more than evident. Each 66MHz frequency increase raised the performance rating by 100 points. If they had gone on like that, the new Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+ would have had the frequencies equal to 1.93GHz and 2.06GHz respectively. However, AMD started using its rating to indicate the performance of its solutions in the first place, that is why the numbers turned out to be dependent on the actual performance of Athlon XP processors in the most widely spread benchmarks rather than the working core frequency. Another slight modification of the new processors showed that the unchanged frequency of the processor bus doesn't make the 66MHz increase in the core clock as efficient as before. That is why the frequencies of Athlon XP 2400+ and Athlon XP 2600+ appeared completely unexpected to us. They are higher. Athlon XP 2400+ works at the actual frequency of 2GHz, while its 2600+ counterpart - at 2.13GHz.

As a result, I composed the following table for your convenience:

When we took a closer look at the first processor based on 0.13micron Thoroughbred core, Athlon XP 2200+, we noticed that it overclocked not very well. It was clear evidence that the old Thoroughbred core stepping was very unlikely to become a basis for well overclocking CPUs.

Therefore, to make Athlon XP work at 2.13GHz AMD had to introduce a few changes to the core. You should understand that it is all about the changes made to the inner structure of the old 0.13micron Thoroughbred core, its architecture remained unchanged. The improvements implied the use of additional metallic layer in the processor die and slight increase in the number of transistors, which create additional capacities reducing electromagnetic induction.

As a result, the new core stepping allows increasing the clock frequency of Athlon XP CPUs up to 2.33-2.4GHz. It means that very soon AMD will be able to launch the CPUs with the rating equal to 3000+ and based on the same 0.13micron Thoroughbred core.

However, AMD is going not just to raise the clock frequencies. The next Athlon XP, which will supposedly have the rating of 2700+ will not only work at even higher core frequency, but will also support 333MHz bus instead of the currently used 266MHz bus. This bus will make Athlon XP support DDR333 memory to the full extent, which should theoretically improve the performance, as we saw here.

New Pentium 4 CPUs

New Pentium 4 2.66GHz and 2.8GHz processors cannot boast the same enhancements as their AMD rivals. However, there are still a few things to say about them as well.

First of all, the new Pentium 4 die is surely of 10% smaller size. When Intel announced its Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU, they also reported that the 300mm wafers used to produce the fastest Pentium 4 processors forced them to make a few modifications to the processor die. These particular core enhancements are used in the freshly announced CPUs. The analogy to AMD is evident here: new Intel cores should allow the company to achieve higher clock frequencies without shifting to new 0.09micron Prescott core. Thanks to new cores with C1 stepping, Pentium 4 (Northwood) frequency will reach 3.2GHz.

The second important issue connected with the freshly launched Pentium 4 processors is the fact that Pentium 4 2.8GHz is the last processor in the family, which does not support HyperThreading technology, and at the same time the last CPU fitting into the mainboards released by the present moment.

The other upcoming Pentium 4 processors will consume more power, which will require more efficient voltage regulators, which are pretty rare on the contemporary mainboards. That is why the owners of Pentium 4 mainboards should better get ready to put up with the fact that they will never be able to use Pentium 4 processor with over 3GHz core frequencies.

Processor Cores Comparison

Summing up everything mentioned above we composed a table showing all the parameters of the discussed Athlon XP and Pentium 4 announced by now.

If we take a closer look at the table, we will be able to figure out distinguishing features of the new core steppings of both, Intel and AMD processors. At the same time, the processor Vcore grew up by 0.025V. It must have been done to improve the stability of the processor operation at higher clock rates.

As for the new Athlon XP, we can state that the core has grown bigger not only in terms of the die size, but also in terms of the number of transistors. However, unlike the competitor, AMD didn't have to increase the Vcore, and the heat dissipation of the newcomers have become considerably lower than by Athlon XP on Thoroughbred core stepping 0.

Testbed and Methods

This test session will help us to figure out how the performance of the new Pentium 4 processors and AMD Athlon XP processors correspond to one another.

To make the testing conditions equal for all testing participants, we assembled DDR333 platforms. Athlon XP platform was based on the today's fastest VIA KT333 chipset, and Pentium 4 platform was built on i845G, which is the fastest DDR333 chipset for Socket478 CPUs, as to our experience.

As a result, we got the following systems:

All tests were run in MS Windows XP Professional. The mainboards were configured to show the maximum performance (we set the minimal timings).

Since there are much more benchmarks to discuss, we decided to split them all into several groups for your convenience.

Performance

Office Applications and Data Encoding

The results of the SYSmark2002 test set doesn't promise anything good to AMD CPUs. All of them were completely defeated by Pentium 4 family here.

AMD decided to figure out what's going on, especially, since in SYSmark2001 Athlon XP performed quite well. The results of AMD's investigation appeared pretty interesting. In fact, the only difference between the two test versions is the updated revisions of the Adobe Photoshop, Windows Media Encoder, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Power Point, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word applications. However, the insufficient changes made to this software are really unlikely to cause these dramatic results for Athlon XP CPUs. And it turned out absolutely true. It is connected not even with the changed weighing coefficients, which characterize the performance of the CPU in each particular application.

It appeared that the changes in the applications algorithms are to blame here. For instance, SYSmark2001 ran 13 different filters in Photoshop. SYSmark2002 runs only 3 filters from the old set and 3 new filters, but instead it repeats the entire process several times. For some reason among the filters used in Photoshop are only those, where Pentium 4 is really faster than Athlon XP. The filters with the different result were removed from the testing set. The same changes were introduced in the Macromedia Flash, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access. From now on they pay more attention to operations where Pentium 4 is faster. I wouldn't claim that there is any plot behind this, though no one can deny that now all algorithms where Athlon XP used to be faster than Pentium 4 are changed in such a way that Intel processor gets indisputably ahead of its AMD rival.

The sound compression into mp3 format is done pretty fast by Athlon XP CPU. As we see, even the new Pentium 4 2.8GHz fails to outpace the AMD Athlon XP 2600+ working at 2.133GHz. Note that the mp3 encoding speed shows slight dependence on the bandwidth of the bus between the CPU and the memory, so that the CPU computing capacity appears a determinative. As it comes to encoding of a more complex media stream, such as video, for instance, the situation gets completely different.

It's true that video compression by DivX codec is a trump of Pentium 4 CPUs. It is not only due to SSE2 support implemented in DivX codec version 5, but also due to the fact that video processing speed is very sensitive to the bandwidth of the bus between the processor and the memory. This parameter is much better by Pentium 4 platforms rather than by AMD ones, as the faster processor bus allows them to use more of the DDR333 SDRAM bandwidth during the tests.

In archiving utilities the situation is very similar to what we have just seen. However, the reasons are almost the same.

Although PCMark2002 is a synthetic benchmark, I placed it in this particular section, because the algorithms its uses to tests the CPU performance include JPEG decompression, LZ77 compression and decompression, text retrieval and audiostream transformation.

As the results show, Athlon XP 2600+ appears faster than Pentium 4 2.53GHz, but slower than Pentium 4 2.66GHz. So, AMD could take this test as a reference as well to calculate the processor rating.

As far as the performance of the memory subsystems is concerned, Pentium 4 processors outperform Athlon XP thanks to faster processor bus, even though both systems use the same memory. Although, the memory subsystem bandwidth in Athlon XP based system equals to 2.7GB/sec, the 2.1GB/sec processor bus bandwidth doesn't let the CPU to use the memory bus to the full extent. Pentium 4 processors can boast much higher memory bus bandwidth, of 4.2GB/sec. As a result, the practical performance of the memory subsystem appears faster as well.

3D Games

Although 3DMark is not quite a game, we would like to start our discussion of the results in gaming applications with this test set. As we can notice, Pentium 4 family is again ahead. Now let's take a look at real games.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a successor of Quake3 in all respects. Pentium 4 performance is certainly faster here, however, what else do you expect from a game based on Quake3 engine?

Comanche 4 also makes Pentium 4 a leader. For example, Intel Pentium 4 here works 15% faster than Athlon XP 2600+.

We can again state that Pentium 4 processor won the laurels here. However, this time Athlon XP 2600+ manages to outpace Pentium 4 2.4GHz.

The second version of Serious Sam has every chance to become the favourite game of AMD fans. Athlon XP 2600+ manages to defeat even the Pentium 4 2.8GHz. But this advantage is pretty tiny: less than 2fps.

This time I also decided to test our CPUs with a new demo of the upcoming hit - Unreal Tournament 2003 hit. Please, take the results in this demo with a grain of skepticism, because it is not finalized yet and doesn't even have a single bot participating. As for the results, the freshly launched Pentium 4 2.66GHz and 2.8GHz outperform Athlon XP 2600+, though the other Intel CPUs fail to catch up with the fastest AMD babies.

3D Rendering

We investigated the 3D rendering speed in three popular testing packages: 3ds max 4.26, Maya 4.0.1 and new version of Lightwave - Lightwave v.7.5. In all the tests we timed the scenes rendering speed that is why smaller values on the diagrams correspond to better performance. To test in 3ds max we used the islands scene, for Maya 4.0.1 we used Maya-Testcenter rendertest methodology and in Lightwave we used sunset and raytrace scenes.

After the update to 3ds max version 4.26 came out, this test set acquired high-quality support of SSE2 instructions. Therefore, no wonder that Intel Pentium 4 processors show their best. However, we haven't yet tried to use new 3ds max 5.0, and as dome sources claim, this version is optimized for Athlon XP.

Maya is not optimized for any processors that is why the performance of the new Athlon XP 2600+ appears nearly as fast as that of the Pentium 4 2.8GHz.

As we have already pointed out before, the results in Lightwave 7.5 may appear completely opposite every time. Everything is determined by the selected scene.

Scientific and Professional OpenGL Applications

To test the performance of the new AMD CPUs in scientific tasks we resorted to ScienceMark 2.0 test (read more about this test here). On my part I would like to point out that this benchmark was independently optimized for Athlon XP as well as for Pentium 4. The diagrams for this test show the time each CPU required to complete the tasks, so smaller value stands for higher performance.

It is quite natural that Athlon XP family proves more successful in math1ematical modeling tasks. The same is valid for the Cipher cryptographic test. Only in molecule modeling, where high data transfer rate between the CPU and the memory is required, Pentium 4 platform can gain revenge from Athlon XP.

The benchmarks included into SPECviewper test set have always been a trump of Athlon XP processors. The reasons are the same: the algorithms used in these benchmarks are pretty outdated and do not have any SSE2 instructions. And intensive calculations are something Athlon XP can fairly be proud of.

We also tested the CPUs in one more benchmark - SPECapc for 3dx max 4.26. This new test allows estimating the performance in viewports in the latest version of 3dx max 4.26. The test uses four different scenes and animates them within the program environment. For more information about the test, look here.

The computational rating of Athlon XP is high, but during visualization higher data transfer rate between the processor and memory, as well as the support of new SSE2 instructions hand the laurels over to Pentium 4.

Conclusion

So, summing up I would like to say that nothing extraordinary has happened. Intel managed to win back the title of the fastest x86 CPUs manufacturer thanks to the new Pentium 4 2.8GHz. As for AMD, they definitely made a significant step forward by launching the new Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+, but nevertheless, again appeared behind the leader.

It is much more interesting to watch the upcoming processor announcements from both: AMD and Intel. Both manufacturers intend to launch new CPUs differing from the predecessors very soon. They will boast not only higher working frequencies. AMD will move its Athlon XP family 333MHz bus and Intel will launch Pentium 4 processors with HyperThreading technology support. To tell the truth we wouldn't dare predict the results of this competition now…

And in the meanwhile things seem to be just the same as usual: Pentium 4 is the performance leader, and Athlon XP offers the best price-to-performance ratio.