The Sweetspots of Pentium 4 at Present

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Pentium 4 was released on Monday. Compare the performance of the first Pentium Pro running at 150MHz
with today's top of the range 1GHz Pentium 3 chip, we get the idea of the growth potential of Pentium 4. But
just as those rather mixed feelings expressed on many Pentium 4 reviews concerning the Pentium 4 1.4/1.5GHz
benchmarking results, what edges could Pentium 4 bring us over Athlon at present? Is the hollering "Quake 3
is the only benchmark left with above-average scores of Pentium 4 for the time being, ... Right now there is
Quake 3 and then is Quake 3, besides that there is only Quake 3. " true?

To reveal the sweetspots of Pentium 4 at present, we get together some of the benchmarking results from
several reviews in the Table below.

Benchmarking Results of Pentium 4 1.5GHz vs. Athlon Thunderbird 1.2GHz with DDR SDRAM
( click picture icons to reach the original resources; * Pentium 4 vs. Athlon Thunderbird DDR performance gained% ) 

Benchmarks that shows enormous bandwidth advantage of the Pentium 4 system over the competition	Memory Bandwidth Performance Integer-STREAM www.anandtech.com +161%*	Memory Bandwidth Performance FPU-STREAM www.anandtech.com +115%*	Memory Performance - Linpack www.anandtech.com +79%*
Benchmarks that take advantage of the 400MHz FSB and 3.2GB/s memory bandwidth of the Pentium 4 system.	SPECfp2000 Performances www.oocities.org +41%*	SPECviewperf 6.1.2 - DRV-07 Performances www.anandtech.com +20%*	SPECviewperf 6.1.2 - ProCDS-03 Performances www.anandtech.com +7%*
	Video 2000 MPEG2-Encoding www.aceshardware.com +10%*
Benchmarks that take advantage of the 144 new SSE2 instructions applied by Pentium 4.	SSE2 FPU Benchmarks www.hardocp.com	SSE2 CPU Multi-Media Benchmarks www.hardocp.com
	MagniTrax 1.02 Benchmarks www.sharkyextreme.com +243%*	VideoStudio 4.0 Benchmarks www.sharkyextreme.com +117%*	Premiere 5.1 with Ligos- MPEG Benchmarks www.sharkyextreme.com +26%*
	GoMotion Video Decoder Benchmarks www.sharkyextreme.com +41%*	Windows Media Encoder 7.0 Benchmarks www.sharkyextreme.com +55%*	Incoming Forces Benchmarks www.sharkyextreme.com +55%*
	NaturallySpeaking Preferred 4.0 Benchmarks www.sharkyextreme.com +3%*	eJay MP3 Plus 1.3 Benchmarks www.sharkyextreme.com +8%*
The Game Perfomances at the playing screen resolution doesn't depend on the CPUs	Quake III Arena www.anandtech.com +12%*	Crusaders of Might and Magic www.aceshardware.com +3%*	Mercedes Truck Racing www.aceshardware.com +2%*
	Quake III Area 1024 x 768 www.anandtech.com +1%*	Quake III Performance of Different Video Cards www.anandtech.com	Quake III Performance of Different Video Cards www.sharkyextreme.com

It can be found clearly from the Table that:

1. In the specialized memory bandwidth benchmarking, Pentium 4 1.5GHz get ahead Athlon Thunderbird
1.2GHz (DDR) by +79 ~ +161%. To the applications performing on large data streams such as image
recognition, 3D computer model review and Video 2000 MPEG2-Encoding, with taking the advantage
of the 400MHz FSB and 3.2GB/s memory bandwidth, Pentium 4 1.5GHz runs up to +41% faster than
Athton Thunderbird 1.2GHz (DDR).

2. In the specialized SSE2 impact benchmarking, SSE2 optimized boosts Pentium 4 1.5GHz performances
up to +104%. To applications such as 2D/3D image viewer, video and audio editing/endoding/playing,
and speech recognition with taking the advantage of SSE2 optimized, Pentium 4 1.5GHz could run up
to +243% faster than Ahtlon Thunderbird 1.2GHz (DDR).

3. In most of the games today, Athlon Thunderbird 1.2GHz (DDR) run faster than Pentium 4 1.5GHz.
But this doesn't keep back Pentium 4 system to be a top game PC. Since no seriously gamers play at a
screen resolution of 640x480 nowadays. At a higher resolution, the game performance of PC is depend mainly
on the video card.