Geek.com Geek News - WMM v1.2 adds Athlon XP SSE support for WME:

The title of this item says it all, doesn't it? :) The chain of events here is a bit convoluted so I will attempt to sum it up, and JC's News has very detailed coverage. Windows Media Encoder (WME) doesn't use the SSE instructions in AMD's Athlon XP by default, but does use SSE for Intel chips. It erroneously checked to see whether the processor was an Intel chip before checking to see whether there was SSE support (AMD added SSE support with the Athlon XP) and doesn't even try to use SSE for the Athlon XP, even though instruction support is available. Microsoft has fixed this issue and the updated dll file is delivered in the Windows Movie Maker v1.2 update from Windows Update. The inability of WME to use SSE in the Athlon XP accounts for a dip in Sysmark 2001 and Winstone 2002 Content Creation benchmarks, so beware of those results unless they mention this issue. If you have or plan to get an Athlon XP for your system and want full WME performance on your Windows system, you should grab the WMM v1.2 patch. Clear enough? BTW, AMD also released a patch earlier, but I'd stick with the MS one as it will probably be better supported.


-------------------

My(Michael Buen) sidenote on pentium 4 vs amd:

yung sinasabing mabilis ang pentium 4, because of graphics, and since bulk of the operation of pc is graphics, hence intel overall, is fast they claim. actually pag webserver, or database server, no graphics, no effect sa serving speed yung SSE ng intel.

it is a mis-interpretation na mabilis sa graphics ang intel, actually mabilis p4 sa multimedia. multimedia != graphics. meron encoding decoding process ang mga music and video. kaya namimisinterpret ng iba na mabilis ang intel s graphics, they confused multimedia apps for graphics app. sa games there is no such thing as encoding and decoding process.

what they really mean is mabilis talaga yung P4 is yung encoding/decoding process because of nice MMX(multimedia extension), SSE(2nd gen MMX), SSE2, SSE3 instruction set in intel. mabilis ang P4 sa multimedia because meron pasadyang instruction set para sa multimedia. maigi intel sa video editing becase of its heavy-duty encoding/decoding process, but it is not graphics, encoding/decoding process is not part of graphics subsystem. actually meron na SSE2/SSE3 sa AMD64

kaya yung iba pag sinasabing gaming, AMD ang ina-advise bilhin, walang kinalaman ang MMX/SSE sa gaming, mabilis talaga performance ng AMD, because of its L1 cache size and good instruction-prefetching. tapos pag graphics-intensive, intel daw bilhin, heheh what they really mean is multimedia. multimedia =/= graphics =/= gaming



last note:
SSE2/SSE3 plays an important role in Mac OS X. buy processor which is SSE3 capable if you intend to run this class of operating system. Adobe Photoshop in PowerPC processor uses Altivec (the equivalent of SSE2/SSE3)