Media encoding, Raytracing and KribiBench
Encoding wave files into 192KBps MP3 places a greater reliance on the CPUs' pure computational speed. Memory bandwidth and latency play a far smaller role. That's why the 1.8GHz Sempron 3100+ is slower than the 2GHz Socket A Sempron 2800+, and it's also the reason why a Prescott 2.8GHz processor is only marginally faster than the inferior Celeron version. 2.2GHz of Clawhammer power takes top spot, but it does cost double the price of our budget trio.
Media encoding is where Intel's Pentium 4 has always done well. Celeron D 335 easily manages to beat out the equivalent Socket A Sempron 2800+ here and falls just behind the slightly more expensive S754 Sempron 3100+.
Raytracing, via Realstorm's benchmark, has always been AMD's domain. It's also where Athlon 64 and, by inference, the Sempron 3100+ do especially well.
KribiBench, on the other hand, is more suited to Intel's architecture. It's horses for courses, or CPUs for programs.
