At least in the 7-zip benchmark, the Pentium III-S 1.4Ghz seems much faster. It beats an Athlon XP 1.53Ghz by 8.6% and a Duron 1.3Ghz by 38.1%. Here's the list I maintain:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fBPxW … #gid=1443406194

allow me to make this short
www.cpu-world.com/Compare/448/AMD_Athlo ... GHz-S.html

Stojke, you ask about the speed of Athlon 1400 vs. Pentium III 1400 MHz.

clueless1, yes the Pentium III-S is much faster, but it's a Server CPU with double L2 cache. You have the Tualatin CPU's also with 256kb cache. So, the direct comparison of Athlon with the PIII-S is not really fair.
A fair comparison would be with same clock and same L2 cache.

Here is a good big benchmark with the CPUs you've asked. With Q3, UT2003, 3DMark2001 and other audio/video and some sandra benches.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/benchmark … hon,590-25.html

The PIII-S 1400 is quite faster as you can see. But when you look at the result for the PIII 1200 (with 256kb cache), and the Athlon C 1200, then the gap is quite close.

I also did benchmarks which include the Athlon and Pentium III-S with 512k L2 at 1400MHz. See this link. The Athlon uses the SiS745 chipset which is paired with DDR.

Performance-wise I don't think they differ much. The Pentium III-S runs a lot cooler (and technically is the better chip) but somehow I would choose the Athlon in desktop-timecorrect-value- and history point of view.

[edit]
@melbar: sharp! I corrected it.

Compared the Athlon with SiS745 and Pentium III-S with i815, the following benchmarks have spelling errors: "Pentium III-S 1400 (SiS745)"

• CPU Free Bench
  FPUMark '99
  Quake 2 640x480 software (demo1)

Edit:
Acc. the point 'desktop-timecorrect-value- and history point of view':

Athlon 1400C, Release Date: June 6, 2001

Pentium III 1400S, Release Date: January 8, 2002

it should be interesting a comparasion of:
Athlon 1400 (FSB 200)
Athlon 1400 (FSB 266)
Pentium III 1400
Pentium III-S 1400
Celeron 1400
Duron 1400
Athlon XP 1600+
Athlon SFF 1600+ (basically an XP 1600+ with FSB 200)
Pentium 4 1.4 GHz and maybe 2.0 Ghz due to their low IPC

Pentium III-s 1400 sits on a 133mhz bus while the Tualeron 1400 sits on a 100mhz bus. On chip computations will go at the same speed, but as soon as something has to be accessed across the bus the P-III wins. The 1400mhz P-III also has double the cache, if the specs I have read are to be believed.

I guess a weak spot of the Athlon would be that it has no SSE, while the PIII does.
Depending on your choice of benchmarks, I expect the Athlon to be slightly ahead of the PIII in most cases, but the PIII being faster when SSE is leveraged (even if the Athlon runs a 3dnow! variation of code instead, as 3dnow! is not as efficient as SSE is. SSE has registers that are twice as wide).

sliderider wrote:

Pentium III-s 1400 sits on a 133mhz bus while the Tualeron 1400 sits on a 100mhz bus. On chip computations will go at the same speed, but as soon as something has to be accessed across the bus the P-III wins. The 1400mhz P-III also has double the cache, if the specs I have read are to be believed.

The P3-S 1400 has 512 KB L2, the P3 1400 and the Tualeron 1400 has 256 KB L2. To sum up:

P3-S 1400/512/133
P3 1400/256/133
Celeron 1400/256/100

Yep, PIII-S is definitely the winner. Better at 7-zip, SuperPi, 3DMark00/01/03, Doom 3, and a bunch of other stuff. The Athlon would probably win at pure FPU and, on a decent motherboard, memory bandwidth.

The PIII-S is also much better at Xvid and H.264 video decoding, with PIII-S at 1575 capable of handling both formats at 720p. The T-bird completely falls flat. Probably because of the lack of SSE.
Video for CPUs - The Software Decode Reference Thread

I've found that Athlon and Athlon 64 systems on VIA chipsets often have some kind of performance issue that dramatically reduces GUI performance. I used Tom2D to compare VIA K8T800 and KT333 to nForce2 and the NV chipset blew the others away with the same video cards. It's most obvious when a full screen fill happens, like a minimized window going back to full screen. I think it is apparent with web browsing too. That might affect video as well.

3DNow is apparently at least somewhat useful for video decoding. People wrote 3DNow iDCT functions, for example. But yeah SSE is definitely useful. I had a P3 Katmai downclocked to 300MHz and it could still play DVDs in software without a problem.

sliderider wrote:

Pentium III-s 1400 sits on a 133mhz bus while the Tualeron 1400 sits on a 100mhz bus. On chip computations will go at the same speed, but as soon as something has to be accessed across the bus the P-III wins. The 1400mhz P-III also has double the cache, if the specs I have read are to be believed.

A 1.4 Ghz P3-Tut will also smoke a 1.4 Ghz P4, even with RAMBUS on the P4. It's not even close.

How do they compare when you test test high resolutions in Dos mode? If we're looking to build a retro PC for windows 98SE & DOS that's the more important question IMO.,

dirkmirk wrote:

How do they compare when you test test high resolutions in Dos mode? If we're looking to build a retro PC for windows 98SE & DOS that's the more important question IMO.,

In my experience, my PIII-based system with Intel chipset had considerably better AGP performance than my Athlon-based system with a VIA chipset.
For 3d-accelerated games it didn't matter, but with software rendering (most DOS stuff), it probably would make a difference.
An Athlon with AMD chipset is probably better than VIA, but I doubt it can match the Intel chipset (Intel designed the PCI, AGP, USB standards, among others).

even with RAMBUS on the P4. It's not even close.

The rambus is in fact more of a liability here. The latency is horrible.

if you give the Athlon the best socket A can offer (nforce 2, fast DDR)... I think I would take that over the P3 (back in the day, nowadays I think the Tualatin is perhaps cooler to have), but I might be wrong

the DDR FSB from the k7 shroud help things,

SPBHM wrote:

if you give the Athlon the best socket A can offer (nforce 2, fast DDR)... I think I would take that over the P3 (back in the day, nowadays I think the Tualatin is perhaps cooler to have), but I might be wrong

the DDR FSB from the k7 shroud help things,

if the CPU is an Athlon XP, the P3 might no have chances anymore

Carlos S. M. wrote:

SPBHM wrote:

if you give the Athlon the best socket A can offer (nforce 2, fast DDR)... I think I would take that over the P3 (back in the day, nowadays I think the Tualatin is perhaps cooler to have), but I might be wrong

the DDR FSB from the k7 shroud help things,

if the CPU is an Athlon XP, the P3 might no have chances anymore

At least in 7-zip, the P3 holds its own.

Carlos S. M. wrote:

it should be interesting a comparasion of: Athlon 1400 (FSB 200) Athlon 1400 (FSB 266) Pentium III 1400 Pentium III-S 1400 Celer […]
Show full quote

it should be interesting a comparasion of:
Athlon 1400 (FSB 200)
Athlon 1400 (FSB 266)
Pentium III 1400
Pentium III-S 1400
Celeron 1400
Duron 1400
Athlon XP 1600+
Athlon SFF 1600+ (basically an XP 1600+ with FSB 200)
Pentium 4 1.4 GHz and maybe 2.0 Ghz due to their low IPC

Has anyone actually seen a Pentium 3 1400 non-S chip?
All of the ones I ever read or heard about, were the 512KB server variants.

Scali wrote:

I guess a weak spot of the Athlon would be that it has no SSE, while the PIII does.
Depending on your choice of benchmarks, I expect the Athlon to be slightly ahead of the PIII in most cases, but the PIII being faster when SSE is leveraged (even if the Athlon runs a 3dnow! variation of code instead, as 3dnow! is not as efficient as SSE is. SSE has registers that are twice as wide).

Another weakspot one could consider as such, is the much higher power dissipation of the Athlon (especially the Thunderbird 1400's), but the Tualatin being made of a smaller fabrication process, this also helps in reducing power dissipation.

One advantage of Thunderbird could be the pencil trick 😁