AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1 GHz / 800 MHz

Before the introduction of the Thunderbird, the 1GHz Athlon was pretty much tied with the 1GHz Pentium III under Content Creation Winstone 2000. Now with the release of the Thunderbird we see a slight advantage tossed to AMD although the performance improvement we're measuring here isn't all that great at all.

We have a number of different platforms present in the above graph, but if you're truly interested in a CPU to CPU comparison the best way to do that would be to look at the Athlon on a KX133/KT133 and compare it to the Pentium III on a VIA 133A since the two chipsets share the same AGP and memory controllers. If you look at it like that, then there is a clear performance advantage that the Athlon holds over the Pentium III.

The i820 + RDRAM platform does crowd things a bit while giving the Athlon more competition, but basically in this test you're coming away with a couple percent gain in performance simply by moving the L2 cache onto the die of the processor and increasing its clock speed.