Now it's about time to see how Coppermine sticks up against its archenemy Athlon. It should be a tight match between the two, as we could see from the results above. In office as well as some game applications Coppermine is a lot faster than the old Pentium III and then there is Coppermine's clock speed advantage. AMD sells its fastest Athlon at 700 MHz, the fastest Coppermine runs at 733 MHz.

Office Application Performance Under Windows98SE

Under Windows 98 Athlon still rules SYSmark98, but the margin has shrunk. You may be surprised to see that Coppermine at 133 MHz FSB scores less than at 100 MHz FSB. The reason for this is that we ran Coppermine in a legally available Apollo Pro 133+-platform, that scores worse than an i820-platform would. If i820 was ready and available, Coppermine would get closer to Athlon. Let's face the facts though, Intel screwed it up and Coppermine is still behind Athlon.