AMD Athlon XP 2000+, A Virtual Milestone!

Author : Wayne Date : 7th January 2002

3DVelocity would like to thank AMD and especially Theresa Zimmer for their help and courtesy in providing this processor for review.

 

 

What is IPC? :

IPC is something that AMD are really pushing at the moment, and the reason is obvious. IPC stands for "Instructions Per Clock Cycle" and is a measure of the efficiency of a processor no matter what it's clock speed. The basic theory goes like this :

Application performance = Clock Frequency x Work Completed Per Clock Cycle
or
Application Performance = GHz x IPC

AMD have a few analogies they use to explain this principle, but I'm going to use one of my own. My friend and I have to fetch bricks from the other side of the building site. We each have a pile of 1000 bricks to fetch, but my friend has an advantage over me because he can walk twice as fast as I can. Anyone betting money on the winner at this point is clearly going to back my friend, but you don't yet have the full picture! Although he can walk twice as fast as I can, my friend's wheel barrow is less than half the size of mine. so although he can make two trips to my one, I can actually carry more bricks in one trip than he can manage in two....now who is the smart money on? My frequency (walking speed) is lower than that of my friend, but my IPC (number of bricks carried per trip) is much higher. The reason AMD are so keen to push the principle of IPC is that while their core frequencies may be lower than that of their main competitor, their IPC is higher.

Performance Ratings (PR) Explained :

Okay, let's take this opportunity to clear up the whole PR issue once and for all. PR has nothing to do with Pentium 4 performance, it is based on the speed a classic Thunderbird core would need to run at to reach XP performance levels, so in effect AMD have calculated that their classic Thunderbird would need to be clocked at 2.0GHz in order to match the performance of the XP2000+. The PR figure isn't just plucked from the air, here's how it's calculated :

AMD identified three key areas they felt best represented the consumer and commercial user's daily life. These areas are Office Productivity, Digital Media, and 3DGaming. Using these three yardsticks, the following benchmarks are then run :

Office Productivity :

Business Winstone™ 2001
Microsoft® Office 2000 (Access, Excel, Frontpage, PowerPoint, Word),
Microsoft Project 98, Lotus Notes R5, NicoMak WinZip, Norton AntiVirus,
Netscape Communicator
SYSmark™ 2001, Office Productivity
Microsoft Office 2000 (Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word),
Netscape Communicator 6.0, Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred v.5,
WinZip 8.0, McAfee VirusScan 5.13

Digital Media :

Content Creation Winstone ™ 2001
Adobe® Photoshop® 5.5, Adobe Premier 5.1, Macromedia Director 8.0,
Macromedia Dreamweaver 3.0, Netscape Navigator 4.73, Sonic Foundry
Sound Forge 4.5
SYSmark2001, Internet Content Creation
Adobe Photoshop 6.0, Adobe Premier 6.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver 4.0,
Macromedia Flash 5, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7

3DGaming :

Games
Half-life Smokin‘, Expendable, Q3, AquaMark, Dronez, Unreal
Tournament, Evolva, MDK2, Serious Sam
3D WinBench™ 2000 (Hardware T&L)
3D WinBench 2000 (D3D software)
3DMark™2001 (Hardware T&L)
3DMark2001 (D3D software)

In each category, the performance results are equally weighted. The scores are totaled then averaged for each category before being combined and averaged again to give a single performance metric. To avoid any accusations of cheating, the results are independently audited by Arthur
Andersen L.L.P. This examination includes independent observation and tests of the system configuration, benchmark procedures and the recording of results.

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