"Until we find out more about the exact specs on that AMD system, there's not much more to debate on the subject. At 1.3GHz the P4 and Athlon are both pretty close in Integer and the P4 always takes the lead in floating point. This is the slower speed at which the P4 is available. At higher speeds the P4 just takes off beyond the Athlon's current offerings."
Actually the Athlon has shown to be quite superior in FPU strength. The P4 gets its strength from software that is sse2 optimized. Personally, I do not have a problem with this and I hope that more SSE2 software is developed. I have yet to see the blazing speed in developement of sse2 optimizations, of which everyone pro-intel suggested at the onset of the p4's release happen.
Now in the test you provided as proof of your argument, the test's fail to accuratly describe the test bed platform of the athlon CPU. Furthermore, you made a claim that:
"This is a highly respected, industry accepted benchmark. Are you trying to make the libelous statement that Intel fudged the numbers? I don't think so. Look at the numbers submitted by other companies using the same CPUs, they are close to the same numbers. Are you now saying that they _all_ fudged their numbers? I wouldn't bet on that."
Well, I would not say that myself at all ( as a matter of fact I never did :0) ) It does appear however that if one were to try to fudge there numbers it would not be all that difficult otherwise the results posted by what appears to be a gigabyte motherboard and DDR ram surely would not be listed as an asus motherboard with sdr ram on a slower processor. Can we say quality control? Now before you go and argue the fact that It was AMD's fault ( which may or may not be true) it would certainly appear that SPEC should at least check the validity of the results before they were posted on there website, they are afterall charging for there software.
I would also at this time like to revisit my contention that if the athlon was placed on a different, better performing platform ( in this case the asus board) and given the benefit of the faster cas2 DDR Ram the results might in fact be totally different. Or, shall we instead show results using the p4 coupled with the slower pc600 RDRAM?
Unfortuantly the only way we will know if one of us is to buy the software suite in acess of $500.00 to do these actual test.
So, in summary, you have made a claim to the superority of the p4 vs the athlon. To support your claim you have choosen an AMD platform with whose specs we do not know and can not validate. Additionally, we can not do the same tests on or own, to test any possible improvements that may have come to fold. Now, in my opinion, to which I am sure you will take issue, this makes your opening statement rather week. Perhaps we should move to another benchmark that we ourselves can easily duplicate?
A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!