Final Recount: Pentium 4 vs. Athlon

BAPCo Webmark 2001, Continued

For some reason Athlon beats Pentium 4 in the business-to-consumer part of Webmark 2001.

However, in the intranet-business simulation 'Auto Concepts' Athlon is extremely far behind Pentium 4.

I can already hear some of you say that BAPCo is an Intel-paid operation, which is why this benchmark favors Pentium 4. This is wrong however. BAPCo is a non-profit organization with a whole lot of members. It is true that Intel and Dell are the two members that might be able to make the Webmark2001-results look a bit sketchy, but BAPCo expressed to me that those two companies are not trying to influence BAPCo (who is indeed using office space in Intel's Santa Claran headquarter). One thing is a matter of fact though. AMD is for some strange reason NOT a member of BAPCo.

I personally don't quite think that this benchmark was 'tuned' to make Pentium 4 look good. However, it seems pretty obvious that the software used in this benchmark is not particularly optimized for Athlon at all. This software is what we use all day on the web however, regardless if we despise the missing Athlon-optimizations or not. Adobe Acrobat, Quicktime, Internet Explorer, Macromedia Flash, ... are absolutely common applications. Therefore I would say that we have to respect the high scores of Pentium 4, while keeping in mind that Athlon is clearly put at some kind of unfair disadvantage by common Internet software developers. It is interesting to see this, because so far nobody was ever aware of this fact. I don't know if we can blame the software makers of the above-mentioned titles, or if AMD has failed to work with those companies closely enough. It would certainly be advisable for AMD to join BAPCo.