There has been some hardware review hubbub started by *MDZone. It has been brought to the review sites' attention that BABCo's SysMark2001 uses a version of Windows Media Player that does not identify the SSE instructions on the upcoming AthlonXP (Palomino Core) CPU. Odd thing is that until Windows Media Player is updated, no one will be using a version that does. There has been a patch distributed by AMD that turns on the SSE in the benchmark. My argument, is that then the benchmark does not even come close to reflecting real world execution of the program. While *MDZone trumpets this making statements like this. "I would have to question the use of Sysmark2001 as a fair benchark (sic) by anyone that knew about this before the 1.1GHz Duron was released." I find it dead-on as the benchmark shows exactly what results an end-user can expect. Here is what BAPCo has to say.
The SYSmark 2001(r) Internet Content Creation benchmark has as one of its components a subtest for Windows Media Encoder version 7.0. Working with Microsoft, AMD has discovered that the version of Windows Media Encoder used by the SYSmark 2001 is optimized for 3DNow!(tm) Professional technology, but does not properly recognize the AMD Athlon XP processor as including this performance enhancing feature and therefore does not enable its use. AMD and Microsoft have generated and tested a software update that correctly recognizes the AMD Athlon XP Processor, planned for integration into the next release of Windows Media Encoder. When the change ships in the next release, the AMD Athlon XP processor is expected to see significant performance gains when using Windows Media Encoder. As an interim solution for reviewers only, AMD is distributing this script to fix the detection problem and enable significant performance gains in the SYSmark2001 Internet Content Creation benchmark.