Synthetic CPU Benchmarks

Analysis

As you can see here, the Athlon can flex its muscles with ease against Intel's latest offering. Even considering the possibility of Intel-optimized code for some benchmarks, the Pentium III is no match for AMD's best. Overclock to a modest 660MHz though, and the story changes considerably. While the integer tests still show the Athlon completely owning Intel's chips, the floating point performance of the Pentium III series skyrockets with the addition of 60MHz, and catches up to Athlon with a little room to spare. For those who think FPU is king, Intel may not be out of the game just yet!

The interesting number here are the SiSoft Sandra PRO numbers. While the integer-based Dhrystone tests confirm Winbench's results, the FPU and MMX tests show the K7 lagging behind the P3-600 slightly, and significantly behind the 660. From examining the processors' fp architecture, as well as real-world testing, we already know that the Athlon has a more powerful floating point core. It's possible that these tests are simply Intel-optimized, but more likely there is a problem with the tests themselves. Remember how Winbench 1.0's CPUmark32 had to be updated because of abnormally low scores for Celeron processors?