We put Intel's smoking 2.8GHz Pentium 4 head to head with AMD's punchy Athlon XP 2600+. Two chips enter. Which one leaves?
Only five days after the surprise launch of the Athlon XP 2600+ (clocked at 2.13GHz), Intel has countered with a Pentium 4 at 2.8GHz, its fastest desktop processor yet. Unlike the Athlon, Intel's latest chip had been announced well ahead of time. Since the launch of the Pentium 4, Intel has stressed how scalable the architecture is, and experts no longer have any doubts about that. However, some are still skeptical about the absolute performance of the Pentium 4, especially when there's only a 700MHz difference between the fastest chips from AMD and Intel.
The higher clock speed of the Intel CPU is less amazing than the news about the price cuts for older Intel chips. The P4 2.8GHz commands a premium price of US$508, but the next fastest Pentium 4, the 2.53GHz model, which used to cost US$637, is now only US$243. With a discount of nearly 62 percent, this is the one of the largest price reductions Intel has ever introduced.
Altogether Intel has launched four new P4 models. The top model, the P4 2.8GHz, features a front side bus (FSB) of 533MHz. The front side bus is the conduit between the memory and the CPU where its speed has a key impact on performance. The P4 2.66GHz has the same 533MHz FSB. However, the 2.6GHz and 2.5GHz models are still based on the 400MHz FSB. Thus these processors can be used in older boards which do not yet have an FSB of 533MHz.
Processor performance was tested on the following systems:
| Test platform | Main board | Chip set | Memory | Memory type |
| Athlon XP | Gigabyte 7VRXP | VIA KT333 | 256MB | DDR333 |
| Pentium 4/DDR | Asus P4B533-V | Intel 845G | 256MB | DDR333 |
| Pentium 4/Rambus | Asus P4T533-C | Intel 850E | 256MB | PC800/PC1066 |
The other equipment is identical. It consists of a Promise Fastrak 100 IDE RAID controller card, on which are installed two IBM DTLA 307030 hard drives formatted in RAID 0. The graphics card is a Geforce4 TI 4600 with the Detonator drivers, version 30.82. Therefore the results from earlier CPU tests are no longer comparable with the following benchmark values. All tests are run in Windows XP Professional, with the monitor at a display resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels at 32-bit color.
| Introduction | Business Benchmarks | Gaming Benchmarks | Conclusion |
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