Business Winstone

This test of common office applications nicely demonstrates the usefulness of Barton's larger L2 cache. One matchup to watch for the duration of these tests is between the Athlon XP 2600+ (T-bred) and the Barton 2800+. Those two chips run at the same clock speed, 2.083GHz; they differ only in cache size. The extra 256K of cache is worth 3 points in Business Winstone.

Of course, the matchup here looks grim for the Pentium 4, but office application performance has never been the P4's strong suit.

Content Creation Winstone
After some consideration, I've decided to include results for three generations of Ziff Davis's Content Creation Winstone test. I think you'll understand why when you see the results.

CC Winstone has changed over time to incorporate newer versions of applications, more video processing, larger data files, and in the 2003 release, Newtek's Lightwave 7.5 renderer, which is optimized for the Pentium 4's SSE2 but not for the SSE or 3DNow! instruction set extensions (both of which the Athlon XP supports). I'll let you draw your own conclusions about the merits and motivations behind the changes that ZD has wrought to CC Winstone over the years. Given the results, I thought including all three versions would be the best policy. We will test many of CC Winstone's component tasks independently in the following pages, which should give you a more precise sense of how AMD and Intel products compare in certain types of applications.