Benchmark results

Sysmark 2001
We picked a few tests to give us a first indication of how the new Athlon MP 1800+ performs. The first two are components of BapCo's Sysmark 2001. Sysmark runs a host of applications concurrently as it tests, and in so doing, it makes good use of a second CPU when one is present.

The first of those two tests covers office productivity—relatively simple stuff like word processing, spreadsheets, and web browsing. Here's how the old and new Athlon MPs compare:

The clock speed bump from 1.2GHz to 1.53GHz delivers just what you might expect. Next up is Content Creation—things like media encoding and image processing.

Once more, the Athlon MPs scale nicely as the clock speed goes up.

Quake III Arena
Let's turn to Quake III Arena, the only game I know of that makes good use of a second processor to speed up real-time 3D rendering. Multiprocessor support in Q3A is turned on via a variable, r_smp. Set this variable to "1," and the game makes use of both processors. We ran a rather intensive timedemo of a deathmatch session, four.dm_66, both with and without SMP support enabled.

The new Athlon MP 1800+ is fast enough to beat out a pair of the 1.2GHz Athlon MPs here. This is a classic example of SMP helping, but not nearly enough to double performance. Nevertheless, a pair of Athlon MP 1800+ chips burns through Quake III timedemos at an almost alarming rate.