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Intel Prescott Released
daemonslayer writes "The nondisclosure agreement on Intel's long awaited new Pentium 4, codenamed Prescott, has just been lifted. So can it beat its predecessor, the Northwood? Find out at Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, or any of the other thousand review sites." Or HotHardware, PC Magazine, XBitLabs, or HardOCP. Basically, looks like it's faster, but still not the fastest in all areas. Tide goes in, tide goes out.
Why don't you go check benchmarks before you say faster....Most sites say it is slower than the earlier Pentium 4 because of the increased number of stages in the pipeline. And obviously, it's beaten blue by the AMD A64 3400+ in more than half of the real-world benchmarks.
Sure, the increase in cache helps, but the increase in pipeline stages really kills intensive non-repetitive computing tasks...
and oh...i think I got first post!
Tech-Report Prescott Review
accelenation Prescott Review
Ace's Hardware Prescott Review
Gamers Depot Prescott Review
HardTecs4U
Hexus
K-Hardware Prescott Review,
Legit Reviews Prescott Review
LostCircuits
MBReview Prescott Review
VR-Zone
X-bit labs Prescott Review
XtremeSystems Prescott Review
Extreme-tech Prescott Review
You can click once more at Anand's to get a Printer-version, which is really nice. It's how I usually read their content. Can't direct-link you (I think), since it's a JavaScript thing. Scroll down, and click on "Print this Article".
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
"is AMD going to adjust its PR Rating to the new cores that Intel has?"
I don't think so. AMD Athlon PRs are not measured against Intel Chips.
AFAIK, the AMD Athlon PR numbers are the newer CPUs' (Athlon XPs, 64s) ratings against the older Athlon Thunderbirds which were the last ones that were labeled and sold in MHz/GHz.
So roughly, an Athlon XP2600+ would be akin to an Athlon Thunderbird that was theoretically made to run at 2.6GHz
Remember, a 1.33GHz Athlon Thunderbird stacked up pretty well against a 1.7GHz P4 back then, and only lost out on SSE optimizations.
Actually, you can link it. Its still a large ammount of information to take in though. Good midnight read, I guess :|
Intel did realise that "Prescott" is a much lampooned British politician, didn't they? Official bio here; http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page1376.asp Highly entertaining game here; http://www.urban75.com/Punch/prescott.html
PS. I'll personally think getting A64 is better than these just price/performance point of view, intel is market leader and prices its products higher than equally performing underdogs products.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
You make it sound like Intel is stupid & trying to screw over the consumer with this product. I'm by no means an Intel fanboy, but you're kinda off base.
If you look at the benches, the Prescott cores generally aren't too much slower than Northwoods and the areas where they lag the most are the ones that SSE3 looks like it should alleviate.
The Prescott delivers respectable performance and will end up costing less at the same clock speeds than Northwood. We're not looking at an event like the original P4 launch where the new chip was not only slower but also more expensive & required hardware upgrades to use.
The Prescott is not being marketed as an upgrade to Northwood systems; while I'm sure Intel would love you to replace your 3.2C with a 3.2E, they're not suggesting it be done. They're just introducing it now so they can ramp up production before the Northwood gets phased out.
As far as the 775 socket goes, Athlon64 is also kinda waiting for a new packaging to reach its full capabilities; the A64 & A64FX lines are going to be moving to a unified socket that'll give the A64 access to dual-channel memory.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Uh... no.
If you'd actually bothered to read up on CPU architecture & the press releases, Paladium is actually slated to -reduce- the number of pipeline stages by a factor of 3 and Longhorn plans on moving several of the early steps into software. I've seen some prototypes of Palladium systems running pre-release versions of Longhorn and we're looking at only 5-6 steps in the pipeline.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
First off, Prescott -is- a P4.
Now, I'll assume you're talking about the initial P4 launch (Willamette). This is nowhere near as embarrasing as that was. The Prescott is only a few percent slower than the Northwood at the same speeds and works in (most) existing motherboards. The Willamette, OTOH, when it was launched, required new motherboards & RAM and was getting beaten horribly at benchmarks by chips with a significantly lower clock speeds.
While upgrading from a Northwood rig to a Prescott rig would be silly unless you're making a significant clock speed jump too, the Northwood looks respectable. If you consider that projected prices on them are somewhat lower than Northwood, it all balances out.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Anand mentioned this, but the decision to add pipeline stages, whether it be 1 or 11, wasn't done on a whim. In fact, just to go through with the design, verification, and implementation processes would take over a year (probably closer to two).
Even when you add one pipe stage, you have to worry about creating new hazards/bugs and making sure that the chip is functionally correct. In fact, I'm surprised that Prescott is even considered a P4 core. To me it seems like a radical design change.
My guess is that Intel's goal was greater absolute performance. In the end, they'll get better performance w/ Prescott than Northwood because they'll be able to hit higher frequencies. The performance that Northwood is achieving right now would probably be much more difficult to hit on a Pentium 3 core. And if the extra frequency will help sell the product and impress the naive consumer, then it's extra marketing firepower for them.
The problem with increasing the number of pipe stages is that it becomes more difficult to maintain your IPC... every branch misprediction, cache miss, TLB miss, etc. hurts more, and no amount of out of order execution can keep the pipe filled. We're seeing a trend towards SMT (like the Power5) and chip multiprocessing (Power5 also) just to make better use of our transistor budget.
What I think is really hurting the initial performance is the increased cache latency, at least for the short term. The side effects are probably mitigated by the trace cache. But they waited until 90 nm to release Prescott, and that's probably because of the extra power consumption and area of the extra pipeline registers, but there's also an increase in leakage, so it's a tradeoff. They shouldn't have any problem ramping up their clock frequency. Maybe this wasn't the right way to go, but one thing is for sure - they didn't take the easy route.
both xbit's and anand's have nice Printable versions that are all on one page.
No, it's not at all like a Celeron. The "E" isn't for economy, it's just their way of differentiating the processor. And it's the older chips getting the E anyhow.
The slow initial speeds aren't a failure. The performance stucks now because the chip is designed to scale to very high speeds (as has been mentioned about 1,000 times already). When it hits 4+ GHz you'll see more competative numbers.
Intel uses "geographic" names (towns, mountains, etc.) for all its code names, since they can't be copyrighted. Prescott is a town in Oregon (a state from which Intel draws many of its code names), so I think that the connection to Moby Dick is just a coincidence.
What do trusted computing features and operating systems have to do with the pipeline length? I can't tell whether these posters are clueless or trolling.
I don't anticipate that SSE3 will have much of an effect on performance, certainly not like SSE2 does. It's really just filling in a few holes, instructions that probably should have been included in SSE2 but weren't for whatever reason. Some odd special-case scenarios might see a big boost, but for the most part I would throw out a guess of 0-5% max for most programs, with the majority falling closer to the 0% side of things.
The Prescott delivers respectable performance and will end up costing less at the same clock speeds than Northwood.
This, of course, is the kicker. If/when the Prescott is cheaper than the Northwood, then it starts to make sense.
We're not looking at an event like the original P4 launch where the new chip was not only slower but also more expensive & required hardware upgrades to use
I would say that nearly everyone who would want a Prescott IS looking at hardware upgrades. Only the latest and greatest P4 motherboards will support the chip, and if you've already got a 2.8C GHz P4 or faster, why would you want to upgrade now? Even most boards made 6-8 months ago are unlikely to support Prescott chips, particularly those > 3.0GHz which require new voltage regulators.