What to watch for in the test results
I'll tell you now that this is going to be a very tight contest, so it's important to keep the relative benchmark scores in perspective. All of the processors we're testing today are exceptionally fast, so they're often held back by other components in our test system, like memory, video cards, or hard drives. Not only that, but the processors themselves perform quite similarly, which should be no great shock given the healthy competition right now between Intel and AMD. All told, you'll see a lot of tests where the results are within a few percentage points of one another—or less.

Although we run our tests multiple times and average the results in order to limit variability, many of these results are close enough that the differences may not matter. Either the variance between the results is within the margin of error, or, more commonly, the real-world difference between one score and another is negligible. Keep that in mind.

That's not to say that none of the differences matter. They often do. Some of the performance differences are rather pronounced. And every bit of performance counts, especially in a grudge match like this one.

That said, there are a few interesting matchups here. For starters, you'll want to keep an eye on how the Pentium 4 Willamette 2GHz stacks up against the 2GHz Northwood. The Northwood ought to be faster in many tests thanks to its larger L2 cache, but in other places, that extra cache may not help much. Some software routines won't fit into a 256K L2 cache, but they'll fit fine into Northwood's 512K L2 cache. Those routines should run faster on Northwood.

Next, we've tested the Pentium 4 chips with both DDR SDRAM and RDRAM. These two types of RAM are vying for supremacy on the Pentium 4 platform, and the odds are very good that DDR SDRAM will win that battle in terms of sales. You may want to keep an eye on how those two types of memory perform.

Finally, there's the main event: the Athlon XP 2000+ versus the 2.2GHz Northwood. Can the Northwood's extra speed and cache help the Pentium 4 finally overcome the Athlon? We'll see.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged.

Our test systems were configured like so:

The test systems' Windows desktops were set at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• SiSoft Sandra Standard 2001te
• Compiled binary of C Linpack port from Ace's Hardware
• ZD Media Business Winstone 2001 1.0.2
• ZD Media Content Creation Winstone 2001 1.0.2
• POV-Ray for Windows version 3.1g (multiple compiles)
• Sphinx 3.3
• ScienceMark 1.0
• LAME 3.90
• SPECviewperf 6.1.2
• MadOnion 3DMark 2001 Build 200
• Quake III Arena 1.30
• Serious Sam v1.05

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.