I'm not quite sure what to say here. The Whetstone FPU looks great. Right where we would expect it to be for the 1.2ghz Palomino's (compared to the 1ghz PIII's). The Dhrystone ALU, on the other hand, looks pretty bad... Falling short of the venerable PIII's by a sizeable margin. Why is that? I'm not entirely sure, but neither is AMD. When questioned about the lacklustre ALU, my AMD rep said "We know, and we're working on it". Does that mean that something as simple as a BIOS flash will take care of it or is it a deeper hardware level problem? It seems like nobody knows at this point.

As I mentioned before, one of the additions to the Palomino core was the added "3DNow! Professional" optimizations. They apparently work as AMD hands Intel their ass at their own game, even giving the P4 Xeons a run for their money with a 33% clock-speed disadvantage. Again... Pretty impressive.

For the next benchmark I took some advice from the omnipotent Dr. Damage and decided to go with Science Mark. Science Mark is a CPU intensive benchmark created by Tim Wilkens which uses a series of scientific calculations as a benchmark. The tests really put the screws to your processor subsystem by stressing your cache, CPU and memory bus. While it is not a truely multi-threaded benchmark, it gives us a great insight into the Palomino and the 760MP chipset. For the full results (way too big to post here), you can click here for the 933's and here for the Palomino's.

Again, the Palomino scales well beyond the "old" PIII. If you're interested in what the Science Mark actually does and what calculations it uses, read this article over at FullOn3D. Needless to say, under a serious load, the 760MP runs circles around (at least) the i840.