New from Ziff-Davis, Content Creation 2001 tests warrant attention because complex Adobe PhotoShop 5.5, Adobe Premiere 5.1, Macromedia Director 8.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver 3.0, Netscape Navigator 4.73 and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 4.5 scripts are run. Content Creation Winstone 2001 keeps multiple applications open at once and switches among those applications. All of these have 'hot spots', as ZD likes to call them, that truly test the system, but the CPU especially. Think of this benchmark as the "Crusher" ZD-equivalent test, which pushes real world programs to their limits (as opposed to Quake II timedemo1) on a system level.

We have previously seen how well the Athlon performs in applications stressing the processor's integer unit, and these benchmarks again confirm that strength. Since many of the applications that comprise Content Creation 2001 do not have easily predictable branches, the Athlon may benefit from having a shallower pipeline than the Pentium 4 (the Athlon has to flush ten instructions in the event of a branch mis-prediction, whereas the Pentium 4 has to flush 20). At any rate, the benchmark results speak for themselves, and the Athlon takes an easy first place finish.

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.

Mirroring the results from our Content Creation tests, both of the Athlon processors beat Intel's current high-end offering in Business Winstone 2001. Keep in mind that none of these applications benefit from the Pentium 4's SSE2 optimizations; however, these results are representative of applications available today.