I always like to kick off processor reviews with a SiSoft benchmark. This is a synthetic benchmark, so "real world" numbers are not given (in other words, you look at arbitrary numbers, rather than something like frames per second, or decoding time).

SiSoft Sandra uses excellent tools for theoretical CPU benchmarking for comparison purpose. Version 2002 is updated to support the newest CPU's, such as the Northwood Pentium 4 we're testing.

With Whetstone calculations (floating point), all the Intel chips quite simply walk away from the AthlonXP.  Intel's CPUs have always been strong FPU chips however, and usually have a hard time keeping up with AMD's integer based calculations (which is what the Dhrystone tests are for).  Here you can see the AthlonXP 2100+ quite easily handles all but the very fastest P4.

Here are the enhanced calculation results.  These tests employ the use of enhanced instructions such as 3DNow! and SSE.  Things are pretty even here once again, with the 2.53 GHz pulling way ahead with the increased CPU speed.

This is the most interesting result of all the SiSoft tests.  This shows us exactly what the 533 MHz FSB does for you.  Just compare the 2.40B to the 400 MHz 2.40 - almost 300 full points in both tests! The AthlonXP with PC2100 DDR simply can't keep up with the RDRAM powered Intel chips in terms of memory bandwidth.

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