X-bit labs

Massive Attack: Performance Tests of 14 Processors Priced at $200+ (page 6)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 02/01/2004 | 12:02 PM ]

Performance in Office and Digital Content Creation Applications

As usual, here we are going to share the results obtained in Winstone test packages. Now we are using newer versions of these benchmarks released in the end of 2003. They are Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004.

Business Winstone 2004 is a benchmark, which shows the average performance of the tested platforms during work in regular office applications. The test imitates the everyday work of an average user in a bunch of widely spread programs and displays the result basing on the time it took the programs to complete the tasks. The list of applications used in this benchmark for proper performance analysis is pretty long and includes Microsoft Access 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Excel 2002 SP-2, Microsoft FrontPage 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Outlook 2002 SP-2, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Project 2002, Microsoft Word 2002 SP-2, WinZip 8.1 SR-1 and Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003.

Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 is very similar to Business Winstone 2004, however, it uses absolutely different applications. All of them are intended for creation and processing of images, audio and video streams. The complete list of applications includes a number of popular and widely spread professional tools, such as Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1, Adobe Premiere 6.50, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980, NewTek LightWave 3D 7.5b and Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f.

Even higher working frequency of the new Pentium 4 XE didn’t allow this processor to catch up with AMD Athlon 64, which works much faster in digital content creation applications and common office programs due to its shorter pipeline.

But Prescott based processors performed very well in Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004. They managed to slightly outperform their Northwood based predecessors working at the same core clock rate.

This test is also based on real algorithms. During this test the system performs: ZIP archiving, spell-checking with the help of Link Grammar Parsing Library, web-sites rendering in Internet Explorer 6.0, image conversion into JPEG format, mp3 files decoding with  the help of Ogg Vorbis library, video decoding with Windows Media encoder 9 and DivX 5.0.5, 2D graphics primitives processing, work in 3D via Microsoft DirectX 9 with Havok Physics engine 2.1 physical modeling system, anti-virus checking with F-Secure Anti-Virus, info encoding and decoding with Blowfish Algorithm. However, since PCMark04 is evidently optimized for CPUs with Hyper-Threading technology, the upper part of the diagram is occupied by Intel processors. Among the most interesting observations I would like to mention the fact that Pentium 4 processor on Prescott core is a little bit faster than Pentium 4 on Northwood core according to PCMark04.