eJay MP3 Plus 1.3

Canon eJay MP3 Plus 1.3 is an application that lets a user work with audio files. A user can listen to audio files, create personal playlists, extract audio files from CDs, and convert music files between WAV and MP3 formats. The Canon eJay MP3 Plus 1.3 application is used in this context strictly as a tool to convert WAV format audio files to MP3 format audio files. To simulate the typical user experience of creating entire CDs of music, a large continuous WAV file workload was created from multiple audio tracks.

eJAY MP3 Encoder (Time/s)	Windows 98 SE	Windows 200 PRO
Intel Pentium 4 1.5 GHz	164	56
Intel Pentium III 1.0 GHz	245	75

The performance tool takes the WAV file and, via eJay MP3 Plus Encoder, converts it to MP3 format using the normal method of encoding. The WAV file is encoded at a rate of 128 Kbits per second. The time, in seconds, it takes to actually encode the WAV file to MP3 format is used as the performance metric. The eJay MP3 Encoder has been optimized for the use of SSE instructions.

3DMark 2000

Magnitrax 1.02 (Time/s)	Windows 98 SE	Windows 200 PRO
Intel Pentium 4 1.5 GHz	8689	6689
Intel Pentium III 1.0 GHz	7584	6345

Summation

The Pentium 4 looks to be a promising product. Intel's NetBurst Architecture is definitely a big innovation over Intel's previous P6 architecture. The 144 new SSE instructions could be a major improvement in most performance demanding applications, this of course when developers will integrate these enhancements in their code. Pentium 4's high bandwidth cache technology is also without doubts an interesting innovation that gives the P4 a boost in most tasks.

At this specific moment, the biggest concern going on for the Pentium 4 is the move to the 478-Pin format later this year. As I already mentioned earlier, this is the preparation for Intel's upcoming NorthWoord Pentium 4 that should debut sometime in the third quarter of this year. This makes me wonder if it is worth buying the 423-Pin version at all? If you do, wouldn't you end up being stuck with a CPU that will no longer have support for upcoming motherboard innovations? This reminds me of the move from Slot1 to FC-PGA.

Rambus Shhmangus, ever wondered how SDRAM memory would perform with the Pentium 4? Intel has a Pentium 4 SDRAM chipset codenamed: Brookdale scheduled for the third quarter of this year. This should be an interesting setup. While I don't expect anything performing out of it because it won't be able to deliver the enough bandwidth compared to the dual Rambus Channel featured on the i850 chipset, it still might be an interesting solution for most. VIA seems to be currently working on a DDR -SDRAM solution for the Pentium 4, while they didn't give us any deep information on the subject, we will not comment at this moment.

Should you upgrade to Pentium 4? I believe most of the benchmark spoke for them self's. The Pentium 4 is one awesome Quake III Machine, and if this is your interest, then you might as well consider getting a Pentium 4 system. However, if you are an average user, looking for speed and performance in your every day Office work, then there will be nothing better than sticking with your Pentium III / AMD Athlon based system, as it manages to do the job better and costs more than twice less.

If money is not a problem and if you wouldn't mind passing out some reasonable performance for some software that the Pentium 4 is not ready yet, then it might be the Processor for you, after all, its all about style, isn't it?

That's up to you to decide. -

Oleg Mitskaniouk
01.06.01