Business Winstone

Despite all the P4's advantages in memory bandwidth and clock speed, the Athlon XP still rules this test. The "Barton" chips with 512K of L2 cache are especially fast here. The P4 3.2GHz just barely edges out the Barton-based Athlon XP 2500+.

Content Creation Winstone

The results here are complicated by the fact that CCWS2002 performance suffers when Hyper-Threading is enabled. Generally, Hyper-Threading helps performance, and where it doesn't, it usually doesn't slow things down. However, Hyper-Threading does involve some overhead (managing two logical processors in the OS) and resource sharing (of L2 cache memory, L2 cache bandwidth, registers, and the like). Sometimes, that means lower performance, which is the case here. You can see the drop in the blue line from the P4 2.8GHz (without HT) to the P4 3.06GHz (with HT).

I expect that with Hyper-Threading disabled, the P4 3.2GHz would be beating out the Athlon XP 3200+, but we prefer to test the way we'd want to use the processor, and we'd definitely want to use HT-ready P4s with Hyper-Threading enabled.

Incidentally, we mentioned last time out that we were considering whether to include results for the new 2003 version of Content Creation Winstone, which doesn't suffer from the same Hyper-Threading performance problems. After mulling it over a while, we decided to start using this test, possibly in conjunction with the 2002 edition for a while. However, time constraints prevented us from including Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 among our results this time around. We'll try to include it next time out.