Tech
Pentium 4 v Athlon XP: application performance
ZD Business Winstone 2001With business applications such as Word, Excel, Notes and WinZip, which are all components of Business Winstone 2001, Intel’s new flagship 2533MHz Pentium 4 closes the gap on the Athlon XP/2100+. However, the new Intel chip still cannot shake the AMD processors from top place.
ZD Business Winstone 2001
With business applications such as Word, Excel, Notes and WinZip, which are all components of Business Winstone 2001, Intel’s new flagship 2533MHz Pentium 4 closes the gap on the Athlon XP/2100+. However, the new Intel chip still cannot shake the AMD processors from top place. Even an Athlon XP/2000+ with DDR memory is faster for office applications than a 2,533MHz Pentium 4 with Rambus memory. With DDR memory, the performance of the Pentium 4 drops by nearly 5 percent.
The 28.8 per cent performance difference between the fastest (Athlon XP/2100+) and the slowest (Pentium 4/2000) processor suggests that an upgrade to a faster processor is meaningful for most office applications.
ZD Content Creation Winstone 2002
When running applications used in the production of professional Web content (pictures, video, audio, HTML, Shockwave, Flash), such as Dreamweaver and Photoshop (among others), the 2,533MHz Pentium 4 with Rambus memory is the fastest processor.
There is a 28.8 per cent performance difference between the fastest (Pentium 4/2533) and the slowest (Pentium 4/2000) processor, so an efficient CPU is certainly worth having if you are running power-hungry multimedia applications.