You can argue about its choices — well, at least about still using SysMark 2001 twenty months after SysMark 2002 arrived — but you can’t criticize AMD for keeping its performance testing methods secret. This updated white paper not only offers the CPU maker’s in-house benchmarks of the new Athlon 64 3200+ and Athlon 64 FX-51 processors against Intel’s 3.2GHz Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading, but presents every detail of AMD’s processor evaluation process.
Presented in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, the document moves from a quick recap of Athlon 64 architecture to explore the issues involved in performance-testing the AMD64 platforms in both 32- and 64-bit modes, and in crafting real-world scenarios that reflect users’ experiences in office productivity, digital media, and gaming applications — with programs ranging from the Microsoft Office 2000 suite to Adobe Photoshop 7.0 and Premiere 6.0, MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 digital video converters, and 3D action titles like Comanche 4, Splinter Cell, and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter.
From the latest VIA K8T800 and Nvidia nForce 3 chipsets and ASUS motherboards to details of ATI and Nvidia graphics drivers, here are AMD’s instructions for the most realistic and most demanding productivity measurement possible. Whether you’re looking to duplicate AMD engineers’ results or comparing platforms for your next PC buy, you’ll want to dive into this guidebook.
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