It is official, after millions of test runs, thousands of benchmarking trials and hundreds of hours, the results on the fastest and all round best processor available are in. Will it be AMD's Athlon 1.33 GHz or Intel's Pentium 4 1.7 GHz Willamette wonder that will grab the much coveted title?
Looking at the core frequency GHz values assigned to each processor you would tend to think that the winner would be obvious but the test results tell a different story.
There is of course no clear winner. As is usual with these benchmarking face offs, each processor seems to have its strong points. After looking at the results you can't help but get the feeling that these are almost the same processor as far as performance averages are concerned.
AMD wins hands down on application performance, with the Pentium 4 performing even under the Athlon 1.2's. Intel seems to have the upper hand in games but only marginally. Results on Quake 3 engine based games are Intel's clearest victory but such results could be due to the engine being optimized for SSE rather than for 3DNow. What is suggested by the results is that the Pentium 4 chip performs better than the AMD in the newer game engines but not "much better".
The question raised by the strangely similar results is why did Intel introduce this chip when they are clearly planning to change the core to Northwood in Q4?
Go to the screenshots section to see some tables of the results or follow the Source link in the links section to read the detailed story.