Intel Pentium III 933

Contrary to popular belief, SYSMark 2000 is 3DNow! optimized in addition to being SSE optimized, so saying that SYSMark 2000 is biased against the Athlon because it features SSE optimizations but no 3DNow! optimizations isn't the best way of explaining the benchmarks.

Instead, it is correct to say that SYSMark 2000 is highly dependent on a fast L2 cache. One way we can prove this is by comparing a Pentium III 550 (Katmai) to a Pentium III 550E (Coppermine) under SYSMark 2000. Both of those CPUs run off of a 100MHz FSB, and both feature SSE instructions, the only difference being that the Pentium III 550 (Katmai) runs its 512KB of L2 cache at 275MHz (1/2 core speed) while the 550E (Coppermine) runs its smaller 256KB of L2 cache at 550MHz (full speed, on-die). The 550 (Katmai) ends up scoring a 112 here on a BX motherboard, and on the same exact test bed the 550E (Coppermine) scores a 127, an improvement of over 13% entirely due to the lower latency, higher clocked L2 cache of the 550E.

And any test that appreciates a fast L2 cache will obviously appreciate high memory performance, we already know that the VIA Apollo Pro 133A doesn't have the world's fastest memory controller, thus helping to explain the small 820 + RDRAM lead over the VIA platform.

It is for this reason that the benchmark comes out showing that a Pentium III 866 is faster than an Athlon running at 1GHz. Wait a few more weeks and watch how the Thunderbird (Athlon with on-die L2) performs under this very L2 cache dependent test suite.