Comparing Pentium4 & Athlon64 x64 Performance
by Abbas Jaffar Ali on February 23, 2005

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Intro

While AMD’s CPUs have had 64-bit support for quite some time, Intel just introduced them for their desktop PCs this week. Microsoft is slowly but surely working towards the 64-bit version of Windows XP which is currently in RC2 state meaning it is almost done. Now the Athlon64 has been benchmarked on the 64-bit XP quite a few times but we’re sure that lots of people are interested in finding out Intel’s performance.

This is exactly what we’ve done for this article. We’ve taken some of the benchmarks we commonly use in our CPU testing and ran them across Windows XP in 64 bit. Keep in mind that these are 32 bit apps that are running on 64 bit XP under WoW64. We have to wait for actual 64-bit apps to see if there is any noticeable difference between them and their 32-bit versions.

The way we’ve presented scores on the following pages is that we’ve posted scores of both Intel and AMD CPUs in both 32bit and 64bit Windows. The percentage difference that you’ll see is calculated between 32-bit Intel and 64-bit Intel and separately, 32-bit AMD and 64-bit AMD. The actual scores are also present for your reference. Don’t worry if the above sounds confusing- one look at the graphs and you’ll see what we mean.

We chose the Intel Pentium4 3.73GHz EE CPU (as thats the only 64-bit Intel CPU that we have) and the AMD Ahtlon64 4000+ CPU for benching. From our standard testbench, we used the nVidia 6800GT card and the Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM/8MB cache hard drive for all the tests. On the Pentium4 front, we used Intel's 925XE Desktop board while on the AMD side, the Gigabyte nForce4 SLI board was used along with 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR400 modules with 2.0-2-2-5 timing. For the Intel setup, we used OCZ's DDR2-666 modules with 4.0-4-4-12 timings. The lower timings on the DDR2 memory modules certainly put the Pentium4 CPUs at a slight disadvantage but unfortunately we dont have anything better for now. Also worth mentioning is that Intel doesnt have any 64-bit chipset drivers so we had to use native Windows drivers, however, nVidia has released 64-bit nForce4 drivers which were used on the AMD setup.

PC Mark/Sandra

PC Mark: CPU
Product Score Graph Difference P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 5,786 +1% P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 5,741 Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 4,544 Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 4,534 0%

PC Mark: Memory
Product Score Graph Difference P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 6,260 P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 6,230 0% Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 5,673 Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 5,625 0%

PC Mark: Graphics
Product Score Graph Difference Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 6,380 Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 6,353 -1% P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 6,226 P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 6,163 -1%

PC Mark: Hard Disk
Product Score Graph Difference Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 4,497 Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 4,494 0% P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 4,208 P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 4,177 -1%

Sandra: Memory1
Product Score Graph Difference P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 6,286 +1% P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 6,253 Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 6,128 +2% Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 6,013

Sandra: Memory2
Product Score Graph Difference P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 6,276 +1% P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 6,242 Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 6,083 +2% Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 5,948

3D Marks

3D Mark 2001SE
Product Score Graph Difference Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 24,420 Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 24,204 0% P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 23,178 P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 22,334 -4%

3D Mark 2003
Product Score Graph Difference P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 11,777 Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 11,443 P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 10,753 -10% Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 10,680 -7%

3D Mark 2005
Product Score Graph Difference P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 4,670 Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 4,600 P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 4,364 -7% Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 4,345 -6%

Gaming Benchmarks

Doom 3
Product Score Graph Difference Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 97.80 Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 95.70 -2% P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 89 P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 87 -2%

Far Cry
Product Score Graph Difference Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 82.12 Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 80.06 -3% P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 71.88 P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 66.69 -8%

UT 2004
Product Score Graph Difference Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 199.60 Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 193.79 -3% P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 167.04 P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 160.12 -4%

Application Benchmarks

Cinebench
Product Score Graph Difference P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 393 P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 391 -1% Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 340 Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 339 0%

AutoGK: Divx Encoding
Product Score Graph Difference P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 39.62 P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 39.41 -1% Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 35.91 Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 35.76 0%

WB: Microsoft Windows Media Encoder
Product Score Graph Difference P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 335 0% P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 336 Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 364 Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 369 -2%

WB: Adobe Photoshop
Product Score Graph Difference Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 316 P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 333 Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 349 -10% P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 352 -5%

WB: Winzip
Product Score Graph Difference P4 3.7GHz EE (x64) 350 +5% Athlon64 4000+ (x64) 361 +3% P4 3.7GHz EE (32-bit) 367 Athlon64 4000+ (32-bit) 373

Conclusion

We’re not going to comment on the results since both Windows and the drivers used in this testing are in their beta release. The numbers are there for you to see where the CPUs stand as of now although they are going to get better as both the OS and drivers are optimized. Also keep in mind that these are all 32-bit applications and only when we see true 64-bit applications, will we be able to tell the real difference.

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