Kribibench, MP3 Encoding, Cinebench 2003, PicColor v4.0
Kribibench
Again, Kribibench is cache-agnostic, instead homing in on the P4's pipeline differences and memory access latency to rank those CPUs. Good old Gallatin-2M rules the roost here and you can imagine how a 3.6 or 3.8 Northwood would have done, had Intel stuck with it. The Athlons have a hard time in this CPU renderer and a peek at Kribibench's codes reveal what looks to be compiler help to have it run faster on P4.
MP3 Encoding
We've used LAME 3.92 for a long time now and this article is the first time we've swapped from that to the lastest 3.96 build.
LAME ranks the P4s first by pipeline length (letting the Gallatin-2M's shorter FPU pipe help it beat the 570J) and then by MHz, ignoring cache size and the ability of the memory subsystem. The Athlon processors sit out in front.
Cinebench 2003
Cinebench ranks the processor just like LAME. It's cache-agnostic and doesn't really care for lots of memory bandwidth. The Gallatin-2M's shorter main pipeline allows it higher performance than any of the other P4s on test, coming second only to the mighty FX-55.
PicColor v4.0 32-bit
PicColor enjoys a bit more than 1MiB of L2 cache, the 660 outpacing its 560 equivalent. It's not enough to outrun the 1MiB 570J though, with that processor beaten by the 3.73GHz XE's 2MiB of L2.
