AMD's Athlon XP 2100+ The Last of the Palominos

Media Encoding Performance

Our media encoding tests haven't changed from previous CPU reviews, the only slight modification is the use of a newer version of Lame with better MMX, SSE and SSE2 support.

MPEG-4 Encoding Performance Xmpeg 4.2a - Divx 4.12 Codec - YUV2 720 x 480 - DD5.1 Sound - 29.97 fps Frames Encoded per Second

Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) AMD Athlon 1.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz 29.3 27.8 27.4 27.1 27.0 25.8 25.7 24.3 23.5 22.9 | 0 | 6 | 12 | 18 | 23 | 29 | 35

MPEG-4 encoding performance is still led by the Pentium 4 but now the Athlon XP 2100+ falls within 5% of the 2.2GHz Northwood's performance.

After 1.8GHz the Pentium 4 catches up to the Athlon's relatively linear curve and it is then surpassed by the Northwoods but not by a > 10% margin. It would seem that without any further core modifications the Athlon XP can remain very competitive with the Pentium 4 when it comes to MPEG-4 encoding.

MP3 Encoding Performance Lame MP3 Encoder 3.91 -v -V 0 Time in Minutes to Encode 170MB .wav File

AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) AMD Athlon 1.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz 1.9 1.9 1.9 2.1 2.1 2.1 2.3 2.3 2.3 2.6 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3

The top three performers are about 10% ahead of the next group of three which are then another 10% faster than the next group. A larger cache has no affect on performance here, it's all about raw computational performance. Now let's have a look at how things will scale with clock speed:

With the Athlon XP 2100+ we start to see the Athlon XP's performance curve flatten out here but it'll take a few more speed bumps before we can get a good idea of where the Athlon XP's performance will end up.