A PC manufacturer close to Intel's plans has supplied The Register with benchmarks of the up-and-coming Pentium 4.

At the same time, it appears that Intel has now scheduled a launch event for the week of October 30th, by which time the Pentium 4 will have gone through a couple of more steps.

Currently the chipset stepping is B0, and our source cautions us that these tests are on a beta platform, using non-final steppings of both CPU and chipset.

Nevertheless, the benchmarks are of considerable interest, and add some more to those we've previously seen. At this point, we'd like to point out that in addition to CPU2's marks, our friends at FullOn3D also published some benchmarks quite a while back, while our attention has also been drawn to remarks made by Paul De Mone on Ace's Hardware bulletin board. His comments are both interesting and cautionary.

According to our mole, his tests yield the same results as the low level benchmarks on 2CPU but he also quotes very low figures using Winstone and Sysmark 2000. Business Winstone, he claims, does not yield reliable results for clock speeds over the 800MHz level. Further, the board used for testing requires more optimisation.

Meanwhile, Intel has also started shipping the first samples of its Garibaldi Pentium 4 boxed mobo, which has a way to go before distributors and dealers can start flogging it.

The tests compare the AMD Thunderbird 1.1GHz chip with the Intel Pentium 4 1400, running Win98SE, and 128Mb of memory, and using the nv15 DDR/6.14 det3 for graphics. Here we go:

Business Winstone 99 1.2

Thunderbird: 34.8
Pentium 4: 30.0

SysMark 2000

Thunderbird: 206
Pentium 4: 182

Business Graphics 99

Thunderbird: 513
Pentium 4: 334

HE Graph.99

Thunderbird: 1406
Pentium 4: 961

3D WB 2000

Thunderbird: 107
Pentium 4: 117

3D Mark 2000

Thunderbird: 5764
Pentium 4: 6287

Quake 3 High Quality

Thunderbird: 90.9
Pentium 4: 91.9

Quake 3 Normal

Thunderbird: 148.9
Pentium 4: 192.8

Bus. Disk99

Thunderbird: 6450
Pentium 4: 6755

HE Disk 99

Thunderbird: 22300
Pentium 4: 21420

CPU Mark 32

Thunderbird: 97
Pentium 4: 85

FPU

Thunderbird: 6010
Pentium 4: 4795

Benchmarks (and benchmarketing) are a total nightmare, as Robert Collins points out in this Dr Dobbs piece. Looks like we're gonna have to wait until the end of October now for the reality of odious comparisons… ®

See Also
Fresh Pentium 4 benchmarks hit web
Intel Pentium 4 benchmarks stalinised
Pentium 4: performance puzzle begins
Pentium 4 to launch in October
Pentium 4 in pictures
Intel's Garibaldi takes the Rambus biscuit