Intel Pentium 4 1.4GHz & 1.5GHz

Benchmarking the Pentium 4: A warning

We mentioned in our review of the AMD 760 chipset that we would be using SPEC CPU2000 in future reviews.  Unfortunately, we were waiting on two things from Intel that have yet to arrive which prevented us from completing our own SPEC tests for this review.  The Intel 5.0 compilers which have just been recently released (on last Monday) and appropriate optimization flags for use with the new compilers and the Pentium 4 platform are still not in our hands, however when we do get them we will work on bringing you analysis of SPEC CPU2000 performance of the Pentium 4 and its competitors. 

With the issue of SPEC CPU2000 we’d like to bring you a warning.  While at Comdex we were informed that apparently some pre-compiled SPEC CPU2000 binaries were distributed for use in a SPEC CPU2000 comparison to reviewers.  We honestly hope that these binaries are not used for a cross platform comparison since they are compiled with Pentium 4 optimizations alone and could paint a very poor and untrue performance picture for the Athlon.  SPEC CPU2000 is a very delicate benchmark and is quite compiler dependent.  At AnandTech we make it a point to compile the benchmark under the best conditions for all processors so if you see any SPEC CPU2000 scores published make absolutely certain that they have been compiled separately for the Pentium 4 and Athlon platforms.  Otherwise the benchmarks are essentially invalid.  For the Pentium 4 platform the benchmarks should be compiled using Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 and Intel’s C/C++ and Fortran 5.0 compilers.  For the Athlon platform the benchmarks should be compiled using Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 with Intel’s C/C++ and Fortran 4.5 compilers as well as with Compaq Visual Fortran 6.5.  Both AMD and Intel have submitted the appropriate config files that should be used to SPEC at www.spec.org. 

If any source doesn’t have the config and compiler information made available in their publication be an active reader and be sure to question the results.