The New Athlon Processor: AMD Is Finally Overtaking Intel

The Results A - Office Application Benchmarks Continued

AMD put two benchmarks together, one for Windows98 and one for Windows NT. Those benchmarks are also application launchers and they consist of several different applications.

The lead is similar to what we've seen above with Sysmark98, maybe Pentium III is a little bit further behind. Still this ain't no benchmark that tries to unfairly put Pentium III at a serious disadvantage. I calculated the numbers so that Athlon would score 100 points. This way it's easiest to compare between the CPUs.

Those are the apps used in this benchmark:

• Geomtrix 3Scan
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  The AMD performance tester for Geometrix takes a series of images captures with a standard CCD video camera, proprietary Geometrix hardware and converts these images into a polygonal textured model of the object. The time to process the 40 images and covert them into a 3D model is measured.

• Lizardtech MrSid
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  The AMD performance tester loads the washdc.TIF image file which is one of the samples included in the application and measures the time it takes to compress the file. The file is a panoramic, high-level view of Washington DC taken from an aerial perspective and is 400 Mbytes in size. The compressed format is 20 times smaller or 20Mbytes.

• Ligos LSX-MPEG Encoder
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  The AMD performance tester utility measures the time to convert a 30-second AVI file to the MPEG-2 format using the Logis GO-Motion LSX-encoder.

• Windows Media technology (Netshow encoder)
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  The AMD performance tester utility measures the time to convert a 30-second AVI file to the MPEG-4 format using the Windows Media Technology MPEG-4 encoder.

• Adobe PhotoDeluxe 3.0
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  The AMD performance tester for Adobe PhotoDeluxe measures the total time the system takes to manipulate an image using the sizing functions, image rotations commands, and a variety of filters. Specific functions employed are image enlargements, rotations, colored pencil, blur, accented edges, funnel, ripple, despeckel, dust and scratches, page curl, crystalize, facet, pointilize, cloud texture, sharpen, sharpen edges, unsharp mask, diffuse, fine edges, glowing edges, wind and patchwork. After each function is performed, the action is undone so that all the filters are applied to an unfiltered image.

• Quake2 - crusher.dm2
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  Quake II Crusher demo is a performance test, in frames per second, of ID Software's Quake II engine. The Crusher demo is the most graphically intensive situation that a user would be in, and it reflects computer formance in the worst possible scenario.

• Half-Life - Smokin'
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  The AMD performance tester runs the demanding Smoking demo in HW acceleration mode in OpenGL.