P4 3.2GHz Reviews

Nathan writes "The Intel 3.2GHz Pentium4 has passed its NDA with reviews coming out over the net, including this one at MBReview, This one at HardAvenue, This one at TweakTown and this review at HotHW." Yay. Benchmarks. Wowee-zowee.

Comments

Mock!

[Anonymous Coward]

"I also reserve the right to mock you for paying $300 for an extra 200MHz." -- Scott Wasson, TechReport.

Stuff that matters.

[DeadScreenSky]

Yay. Benchmarks. Wowee-zowee.

If it isn't important, if it doesn't matter, then don't post it.

*doesn't click link*

[Alpha_Nerd]

Let me guess... It's a few percent faster than the 3.0ghz, and costs more.

Do I win a prize??

Who is Intel trying to impress?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Intel trying to get laid by the best of the PC market by showing how fast it can swing by?

What happened to the days when CPU's would take their time, and get the jobs done the right way.

It's not like it can make your PC scream any faster or louder, or can it?

Meh

[ickoonite]

Whilst I would extend my sincerest thanks to dear Intel for yet more predictable inching up of the top speed for x86, I would like to point out that a far more interesting processor revolution is to take place today at 17:00 UTC, in the form of the PowerPC 970.

64bit for the consumer and the world's most beautiful OS or a meagre increase for a 32bit chip with Microsoft Windows. I know what I'll pick...

iqu

Re:Meh

[ickoonite]

Now this is really pure FUD, I'm afraid, but it does make me laugh.

Yeah, it's true that the masses will probably stick to what is cheaper. It's what they're always gonna do, and that's fine, because most people just want Office and maybe the occasional game. Apple will never really penetrate that market.

But this is Slashdot. We demand more from our machines here. We want high speed UNIX boxen and game stations that we can frag at 150 fps on, and if we're lucky, both at the same time.

The bit about binary compatibility shows that you know nothing about Macs. The PPC 970 _is_ backwards compatible with all the old software - everything will run! And the best thing is, as has always been the case with Macs, backwards compatibility is unrivalled. Macs of today still feature Motorola 68k emulation so that they can run software written for those chips, for OS 9 and for OS X.

Windows XP (the equivalent of OS X in terms of consumer accessibility and reliability), on the other hand, has terrible backwards compatibility, and I find that many, many, many old DOS or even Windows programs will not run...

I rest my case.

iqu

Re:Meh

[Surlyboi]

Then, shouldn't you amend your .sig to "Guns don't
kill consumers, consumers kill consumers"?

Re:Meh

[stubear]

I have. Read the line about integer performance and you'll see why Apple will still be playing catchup with Intel and AMD. Most people are going to be doing integer and not floating point calculations when they are running their systems. Those that do benefit from floating point are likely not "Switch" candidates anyway. Either way, it's difficult at best to just drop one system and replace it for another when it comes to FP calculations as you not only need to purchase new hardware, you have to purchase new software and even with Adobe allowing crossgrade licensing, it's going to be a big hit to the wallet.

Re:Meh

[IamTheRealMike]

Macs of today still feature Motorola 68k emulation so that they can run software written for those chips, for OS 9 and for OS X...... Windows XP (the equivalent of OS X in terms of consumer accessibility and reliability), on the other hand, has terrible backwards compatibility

Well, iirc Classic mode is basically running the complete OS 9 in a VM. But by this logic, Windows is perfectly backwards compatable because you can run any previous version inside VMware.

So, to measure how backwards compatable an OS is, running complete old versions inside a VM is to me cheating. You should test how well old apps run in the same environment as modern apps. By this measure, Windows scores pretty well.

Re:Overclocked

[IamTheRealMike]

Well you can't compare a CPU against a computer. A more interesting comparison would be the new IBM chips against these ones. Still, CPU benchmarks of that type are interesting in an academic fashion only, they can always be contested (for not using the right optimizations etc).

I dunno why people focus so much on CPU benchmarks. Why can't I have a faster BIOS? I want a machine that passes control to the OS bootloader in under a second. Instead, if anything, it takes longer and longer with every machine I try - a second or two staring at the NVidia copyright notice, a few more seconds staring at the bios, quick memory check, autodetect devices. Some system info, some beeps, some whirrs, some clicks, then finally the OS starts loading. Of course that takes ages as well.

If we are capable of making such insanely fast pieces of electronics, why the hell is the rest so slow?

*From inside intel*

[OmniVector]

The pentium 4 architecture (heck the x86) is getting long in the tooth. I foresee intel's next market move :)

Intel Employee #1: We can't make our design any better! Intel Employee #2: Surely you jest. Intel Employee #1: No, but I have an idea. Intel Employee #2: What? I'm clueless! Intel Employee #1: Lets up the clock speed! Intel Employee #2: Touche!

(note this is not meant to be a flame, just a little humor)

Buying other items with small performance increase

[del_ctrl_alt]

I have been thinking what other products (cars, appliances, electronics) that boast such small performance increases for such greater expense?

Picture this....

Salesman: and this toaster makes toast .5 seconds faster

Me: great, how much?

Salesman: its double the price of the standard model

Me: Hmmmm

Where's the Pentium 5?

[Zog The Undeniable]

I'm getting bored of "P4"...at least "Pentium 5" would be etymologically correct again!

(Yes, fellow pedants, I am aware that "Pentium" was used for the chip following the 486, as Intel couldn't copyright a number and stop their competitors using the term "586".)

Seriously though, how long have successive generations of Pentium technology lasted? Is it just me, or was the PIII the primary product line for longer than the PII, and when will the P4 break the PIII's record?

My Review

[SamBeckett]

Compared to the older pentiums the new pentium IV performs all the same instructions in exactly the same way. You may sense a small speed increase; however you are not likely to notice it (unless you are upgrading from a 486DX2-66).

Integer performance has increased by (New Speed-OldSpeed)/OldSpeed * (OldBenchmark Score) - OldBenchMarkScore, as has floating point. However, the electricity bill also rose by the same percentage.

Pros: No one ever got fired for buying Intel!
Cons: It costs more than a used car!

Re:Buying other items with small performance incre

[onion2k]

If you run a toast shop, and you're making 5000 slices of toast a day...

Purchasing Cycles

[Detritus]

There are many organizations that do not have a budget or process for replacing obsolete/outdated equipment. Like rain in the desert, money for new equipment comes in infrequent deluges. When money is available, you buy the top-of-the-line computer. You may be using it for the next ten years.

Re:Purchasing Cycles

[the gnat]

when money is available, you buy the top-of-the-line computer. You may be using it for the next ten years.

This is the rationale I hear for buying expensive hardware from Sun or SGI (and I agree, for the most part). I've never heard it used to justify buying Intel's latest offering - PCs are retired quicker than any other platform. If you really need to make a crappy PC workstation last for ten years, you're better off buying a cheaper box, like a 2.4Ghz P4 (which isn't slow by any means), and use all the money you save to purchase spare boxes or parts. You'll definitely need them if you want to keep the system going for ten years.

I know from experience that there are few things more annoying than trying to squeeze the last bit of life out of PCs that have been obsolete and off warranty for two years. . . sometimes, when the moon is out, I can still hear those IBM Pentium 90s calling my name.

Other reviews

[markhagan]

Extreme Overclocking: they actually overclocked the engineering sample. ha! kind of a pricy risk if you ask me. More reviews here, here and here.

Nothing fancy, move along

[zensonic]

1. Up the MHZ by 6.67%
   
2. Benchmarks gets (*suprise*) ~5-6% faster
   
3. ....
   
4. profit.
   

Nothing newsworthy in that really.

So what's the real news?

[Martin Kallisti]

I find it irrelevant whether the speed of an existing type of processor has increased by less than ten percent, although looking at the price compared to the 200MHz lower clocked variant, maybe this would fit under "It's funny, laugh".

However, this processor does seems very suitable for overclocking (4GHz, yikes!). Did anyone manage to come close to that with the 3GHz model, or has Intel increased the therapeutical window of their processors slightly? ;)

Re:Buying other items with small performance incre

[JanneM]

If you need that kind of toast-making performance, you're luch more likely to either build a toaster-farm with dozens (or maybe even hundreds) of inexpensive run-of-the mill toasters, or splurge for a big, heavy-duty continuous-feed made-to-order beltway toaster.

Sort of like getting either a cluster of cheap middle-performing x86 boxes, or a big-iron type machine from Sun or IBM, come to think about it.

I mean, how many apps really critically need that 2% parformance increase, but do not benefit from a dual or quad-cpu machine, a cluster, or a big non-x86 Unix machine?

Brief benchmark rant

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I have a small rant concerning benchmarks. I'm in the sciences and often look at graphs of data. I am getting SO TIRED of benchmark results being posted with y-axes that go from 2500 to 2600 showing the relative "improvement" of newer, faster cpu's when they ought to be scaled from 0 to X "mips", "flops" or whatevers so that you can see at a glance that the changes are or are not significant.

Better yet are plots showing how much they have "improved" relative to simple clock speed increases (if at all!) and normalized "mips/dollar" for cost evaluation....

Other sources

[corvi42]

For those who care, there is also a comparison of AMD 3200+ to P4 3.2 GHz at tomshardware: here

One example of 64bit gaming benefits

[fegu]

Modern chess engines represent the board as several 64bit bitboards, one for the white queen, one for the black queen, one for the white pawns etc.

This as opposed to the good old days with a 64 byte array containing 1 for the white queen, 2 for the white pawns etc.

Bitboards really benefit from 64bit registers and 64bit (integer) arithmetic.

Re:Overclocked

[d^2b]

Want a faster BIOS? Perhaps you want LinuxBIOS From the link

It does a minimal amount of hardware initialization before jumping to the kernel start and lets Linux do the rest. As a result, it is much faster (current record 3 seconds)

And yes, apparently it boots Windows 2000 too.

Re:Processor design needs to change.

[TeknoHog]

I agree that x86 is not the best way of computing. However, there are many factors that contribute to power consumption.

• There are current leaks in transistors that account for a lot of wasted power, but can be solved by new manufacturing techniques. IIRC Intel has already developed some of these. Nanotubes and other fancy tech will probably be even better.
• Wide and shallow pipelines probably need lots of transistors as well. Graphics processors are much more parallelized than CPUs, look (listen?) how much cooling they need. On the other hand look what VIA has done with x86 processors, they can be passively cooled.
• MHz is only one factor in power consumption, just like it is only one factor in performance. And I'm looking forward for some clockless designs.