Important Pentium 4 Evaluation Update

Are Our Initial MPEG4 Results Not Meaningful?

Yesterday I received an alarming email from Toby Hudon, who expressed his doubts about the validity our MPEG4-benchmarking results:

I pointed out earlier, that I am very aware of the responsibility Tom's Hardware is carrying as a premium technical publication. Every doubt that a reader expresses about our benchmarking scores is looked into immediately and with the outmost care. Toby's concerns are making a whole lot of sense, because we obviously want the MPEG4-benchmark scores to be useful to those people who are actually doing DVD-rips. It is not hard to assume that the majority of DVD-rips are supposed to produce the best possible quality and so it obviously became questionable to me if our benchmarks, that were indeed carried out using the MMX-iDCT, are actually helpful to those who really do MPEG4-encoding. As a result I rushed to repeat the MPEG4-benchmarks runs with the IEEE-iDCT to find exactly the results, which Toby had been able to forecast by simply drawing logical conclusions.

The New MPEG4-Encoding Situation

Before I get into the new results, I would like to point out that our initially published MPEG4-encoding benchmark scores were not wrong, but I had used the default MMX-iDCT setting, assuming that it is the iDCT used by the majority of DVD-rippers. However, you may remember that those results published on Monday were showing Pentium 4 as the clear winner of the MPEG4-benchmark, which had been an important issue to me for drawing my final conclusions about Pentium 4.

Those are the initial results we published. Pentium 4 is obviously way ahead of the competition, seemingly due to its high memory bandwidth and surprisingly powerful MMX-engine.