P4 vs. Athlon -- More Info from PC Magazine!

The reason a 2.2 Ghz Athlon 64 does better on benchmark tests than a 3.4 Ghz P4 is because it has a shorter integer pipeline. A long pipeline is good for streaming-media apps, but it tries to predict a lot. That means that on typical business applications it has to flush and reload many times because of predicting wrongly (since business apps are unpredictable). Therefore, a P4 doesn't do as well on some of the tests as the Athlon does.