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Intel Pentium D dual-core desktop CPU
Pentium 4 670, too
Let's hit upon ScienceMark 2.0's memory bandwidth and latency first. It's usually a decent indicator of overall performance, but the release of dual-core models puts its predictive ability at risk.
Nothing much to choose between single- and dual-core Intel models here. They both share a single system bus, though. AMD's Athlon 64s always come out on top here.
Access latency has always been an Athlon 64 forte. Note that the use of Corsair's low-latency DDR2 SDRAM has reduced most LGA775 CPUs' memory access latency to under 80ns.
Our cryptography benchmark is also single-threaded. That's precisely why the Pentium 4 670, with its 3.8GHz clock, does relatively well. Pentium D 820 is the slowest of the bunch, which includes a 3GHz 500-series Pentium 4.