Ziff-Davis has also updated their Business Winstone package for 2001 with the following applications: Norton Antivirus 2000, WinZip 7.0, Microsoft FrontPage 2000, Lotus Notes R5, Microsoft Access 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, Microsoft Project 98, Microsoft Word 2000, and Netscape Communicator 4.73. Winstone 2001 now defrags and reboots the test system before each test run to ensure reproducible results. The applications were chosen using market data from PC Magazine and ZD Media publications.

Like Content Creation, Winstone 2001 is comprised entirely of applications that lack SSE2 code. To make matters worse, it is no secret that the Pentium 4 is not an over-achiever when dealing with predominantly integer-dependant code. It is, then, no surprise to see the 1.7GHz chip behind AMD's top offering.

However, the fact that the Pentium 4 is able to surpass the Athlon 1.2GHz processor is interesting. Could the speedier ALU's actually be bolstering performance?