Painting a New Picture of Pentium 4: Tweaked MPEG4 Encoding

SSE2-Optimized IDCT Scores

Once SSE2 comes into play, which according to Intel is easy to implement, the Pentium 4 can show its real muscles, scoring significantly better than its competition.

Please be reminded of several things before you draw any conclusions of Pentium 4's performance in comparison with Athlon's.

  • AMD did not supply an Athlon-optimized version of FlasK, which could and actually should show Athlon score a lot better as well. Still Athlon benefited a whole lot from the re-compilation with Intel's latest compiler as well. I hereby encourage AMD's developers to supply me with their special version to show what Athlon is really capable of.
  • Intel made perfectly clear that they could have optimized the code a lot more to make Pentium 4 as well as Pentium III look even better. Due to time constraints and also due to the fact that a simple compile-job could already provide excellent results Intel refrained from doing that.

I was specifically asked to keep this special FlasK-version to myself, even though a lot of you would most likely be very interested in it. I suggest you contact the author of FlasK MPEG, Alberto Vigatá and ask him to establish a dialog with Intel as well as AMD to improve his excellent application. It should really go through him and certainly not through me. I just got the ball rolling.