Office / Web Benchmarks
Good old Sysmark2000 shows the well-known picture. Pentium 4 is left far behind by each of the tested Athlon processors. The Office applications used in Sysmark2000 are simply not optimized for Pentium 4 and Athlon can handle this kind of software much better.
Webmark2001 is a benchmark that was released from BAPCo pretty much at the same time when Intel released Pentium 4. Looking at the results may make this fact seem more than just a coincidence, as it makes Pentium 4 look very good. The new Athlon 1333 is not quite able to reach the scores of Pentium 4 1.5 GHz, but once it's overclocked to 1466 MHz it can even score a tiny edge over the Intel CPU.
Breaking up Webmark2001 in its three different parts shows almost the same results in its business-to-business section. Pentium 4 is only beat by the Power Box.
The business-to-consumer part of Webmark2001 is Athlon's strength and Pentium 4 is left behind by all AMD-contestants.
The intranet simulation is where Pentium 4 can shine in all of its glory. Even the Power Box is left behind.
All in all it is still pretty difficult to judge the meaningfulness of Webmark2001, but the same could be asked about Sysmark2000. Today's processors are way fast enough to run office applications or Internet-stuff. It would be crazy to make any of the processors in this test a winner based on those two benchmarks.
