Winstone/Threadbench

Winstone is a good measure of real-world performance using general business apps. As you can see here, the Athlon leads, but not by a huge margin. This is more or less expected, as real-world computing rarely uses solely the CPU subsystem without taxing other I/O such as hard drive read/writes. In fact, the time spent waiting for these bottleneck operations dwarfs the speedy processing of the CPU, so changing a processor rarely affects the test results greatly, as you can see by the smooth gradient between systems.

Threadbench is actually a synthetic benchmark optimized to test and confirm multiprocessing. It runs multiple threads which can be broken down between each CPU and tests the SMP capabilities of the hardware and OS solution. Running on one CPU, we're still able to get a good representation of integer performance from the number of threads processed. The Athlon 600 holds a slight lead over the Pentium III 560, but it is a tenuous one. Threadbench will be an interesting test once AMD is able to deliver with a dual-CPU chipset.