Important Pentium 4 Evaluation Update

The New MPEG4-Encoding Situation, Continued

Now let's have a good look at the new results, scored by using the IEEE high quality iDCT with Flask MPEG.

It's not hard to spot the difference. A highly overclocked Pentium 4 at 1.728 GHz and 108 MHz system bus is just about able to reach the scores of a normal Pentium 3 at 1 GHz. Athlon is almost double as fast!

Let's also have a very good look at the speed comparison between MMX-iDCT and IEEE high quality iDCT.

While Athlon as well as Pentium 3 drop down to about 40% of the speed when using the high quality iDCT that's necessary to produce MPEG4 videos of good quality, Pentium 4 plummets down to 20%!!! That means Pentium 4 needs FIVE TIMES as long to encode an MPEG4-movie to high quality! Looking at the absolute numbers shows that you've got to wait about 12 hours for an average movie to be encoded at high quality with Pentium 4 and only 7 hours with a fast Athlon processor. This is a difference of FIVE HOURS!!!!