Benchmark results

Memory performance
Just to satisfy that geeky urge, we generally kick things off with some synthetic memory bandwidth benchmarks. The release of the P4 3.2GHz gives the Pentium 4 yet another chance to show off one of its greatest strengths, as you'll see below.

All of the chips you see bunched up at the top there with the really long bars are Pentium 4 chips with 800MHz front-side bus speeds. Those chips are all running on Intel's 875P chipset with 6.4GB/s of bus and memory bandwidth available to them. (As you can see, the lower speed grades with 800MHz bus support are given a "C" tag to distinguish them from older P4 chips.) The older Pentium 4 chips still have a faster front-side bus than any of the Athlon XP chips, so they come ahead of the Athlons.

By popular demand, fancy-looking Linpack graphs are back in force. This one shows the entire memory hierarchy, save storage devices. As the matrix size grows, Linpack's floating-point math calculations have to be performed in L1 cache, then L2 cache, then in main memory. You can see how performance drops as we move from cache into main memory. For certain types of FP math calculations with really large datasets, the Pentium 4 is very tough to beat because of its exceptional memory bandwidth.

Cachemem tells a similar story with a little more granularity than Sandra, showing us read speed, write speed, and memory access latency. All of these systems have very low latency memory subsystems, relatively speaking.