Desktop CPU Comparison - September 99

There are a number of precedents set by the first few benchmark runs that you will see pop up throughout the course of this comparison, the first being the issue of a larger L2 cache versus a smaller, albeit faster L2 cache.  You'll find that Intel benchmarks will tend to favor larger L2 caches rather than smaller but faster ones as they are definitely trying to prove that their Celeron processors are in fact slower than their Pentium II/III processors.  At the same time, you'll notice that AMD benchmarks will tend to favor larger L1 caches and won't rely so heavily upon faster L2 caches as one of AMD's major advantages over Intel (especially in the case of the Athlon) is their larger L1 cache (64KB for the K6-2/3, 128KB for the Athlon vs 32KB on the Pentium II/III/Celeron). 

With that said, it isn't surprising to see the K6-X family line pull in closer to the Pentium II/III in the AMD supplied Adobe PhotoDeluxe benchmark.  The benchmark itself isn't such a far stretch from the truth, rather it illustrates desktop image editing performance of all of the processors to a reasonable degree of accuracy.  Also keep in mind that with PhotoDeluxe we're talking about entry level 2D image editing performance, it's way too early to be coming to any conclusions just yet however Intel's Celeron does seem fairly strong as it remains on the heels of the Pentium II/III with the Athlon naturally taking the lead.