AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1.33GHz/1.30GHz

The MP3 conversion process isn’t particularly bandwidth intensive, but it is very FPU intensive.  Without SSE2 instructions to really make the Pentium 4’s FPU shine (even then it is questionable how useful they will be in a situation like this), the Athlon easily takes the performance lead here.

The two systems that completed the test in 20 seconds were the two 1.33GHz Athlon platforms, confirming that extra memory bandwidth and slight differences in memory latency don’t seem to effect performance. 

Because the test isn’t bottlenecked by memory bandwidth, the CPU scaling factor plays quite nicely.  The 1.33GHz Athlon is clocked 33% higher than the 1GHz Athlon and is 20% faster in this test. 

Again, the Pentium III is falling far behind the rest of the competition. 

Converting WAV files to Windows Media Audio files does take noticeably longer than converting to Variable Bit Rate MP3s, but the file size is also smaller at 128kbps.  The standings don’t change much here from what we saw with the MP3 encoding tests, the two 1.33GHz test beds still score evenly indicating that the Athlon’s L2 cache along with the available bandwidth courtesy of the KT133A’s PC133 memory subsystem is enough for this test. 

Most of today’s applications fall into this category as well.  It is all too often that when people hear the word encoding they immediately think memory bandwidth limited, and that is obviously not the case.