Desktop CPU Comparison - September 99

For those of you that have ever done any video editing, Adobe Premiere is a fairly good solution for the user that isn't looking to get into multi-thousand dollar editing solutions, and it also doubles as an excellent benchmark as it properly stresses the video, CPU and memory subsystems of your computer.   Since the benchmark was provided by BAPCo with their SYSmark 98 package we can rule out any SSE or 3DNow! optimizations, so let's get to the analysis.

At the start, the K6-2 300 and the Pentium II 300 appear to be virtually identical performers in this benchmark, however the scaling L2 cache frequency of the Pentium II versus the static L2 cache frequency of the K6-2 (at 95/100MHz) keep this competition from sticking through as the clock speed increases.   Interestingly enough, the K6-III 450 has a nice time outpacing the Pentium III 450 by a 2 second margin, not much but it reaffirms the original assumption that video editing depends primarily upon hard disk and memory performance, then CPU performance. 

The Athlon comes out on top once again, and once again it isn't by the 30 - 40% performance improvement we're used to rather a 5 - 10% improvement.