WAV crunchin', Video Encoding, KribiBench, Raytracing
Clock speed, on a specific platform, does count for an awful lot in pure computational activities. That's why the Celeron 2.8GHz CPU isn't so bad at WAV crunchin'.
The lack of data throughput cannot be made up via a higher clock speed in XviD encoding. The 2.4GHz Pentium 4 Northwood 800FSB CPU's performance is far superior than the 2.8GHz Celeron. It's also more expensive. Think of the Celeron 2.8GHz model as something like a 2GHz Northwood. Even AMD's Barton XP2500+ shows the faster-clocked Celeron a clean pair of pins.
Realstorm Raytracing has never been a forte of the basic Pentium 4 architecture. It's of little surprise to see the Celeron trailing badly.
KribiBench, however, has always looked fondly upon the P4's SSE2 implementation. The benchmark results clearly show that a bigger, faster cache and a high-speed front-side bus are important requirements for decent performance.
