Pentium 4 has SSE2 optimizations that current Athlons don't have. That gives the P4 an advantage in games specifically optimized for SSE2, of which there are...none? Very few? I think there are a few, but I can't think of any specifically right at the moment. It'll come to me. Both P4 and Athlon have SSE and MMX/3DNow! instructions, and there are many more games optimized for those. If you read gaming benchmarks, you'll see that at similar speeds/pr rating, there just isn't much of a difference between the Athlon and the P4. Intel's always perform better in Quake 3, and almost always in games built around the Quake 3 engine. However, the difference in performance is still too small to justify basing your purchasing decision on it.
Athlons do tend to perform better in office applications, consistently scoring more points in synthetic benchmarks such as Business Winstone 2002, which is a General Use / Office Applications (Like MS Office XP) benchmark. But, again, the real-world performance difference is negligable.
Now, if you were into 3D rendering, that is, 3D graphics design (not games), I would say the P4 holds some definite advantages, but the Athlong performs better even in some of those tests.
If you were debating the difference between the Athlon 3000+ and the P4 3.06, I would say that the P4 is superior, only because of hyperthreading. But, in any P4 less than 3/06 gig, hyperthreading is not enabled, and is therefore not an issue.
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<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Twitch on 03/11/03 00:53 AM.</EM></FONT></P>
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