Office Application Performance Under Windows 98
Winstone used to be the most important benchmark in the PC-world and a product with a good Winstone score is still highly respected. However, times have changed, today the user doesn't have to wait for office applications to finish their job anymore, office applications are nowadays continuously waiting for the next user input. In other words, even the cheapest systems you can buy today will still provide more than enough power to run Word or Excel. This is why the importance of Winstone scores is certainly decreasing. Today's PC are used for a lot more than just office applications. 3D-gaming, video editing, 3D-modelling, sound editing and many other things are the really power hungry applications of today and it's not only a minority anymore that runs those applications. So let's be aware that a high Winstone score does not automatically make a CPU a great overall performer. This is certainly different compared to two years ago.
It is certainly impressive to see that AMD's K6-3 at 450 MHz is able to beat Intel's new flagship Pentium III running at 500 MHz. The new features of Pentium III don't help in Business Winstone at all, Pentium II at 500 (which does not exist, it's overclocked) and Celeron 500/100 (which also doesn't exist yet) are scoring the exact same results. Even Intel's own performance brief agrees with that. The K6-3 can really show its muscles, the new on-die L2-cache makes it significantly faster than Intel's 6th generation processors at the same clock speed.
