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.

Comments

Readable review

[Ed Avis]

Could someone suggest a review site that doesn't split every article across 20 web pages?

Thoughts.

[DarkHelmet]

In case you don't want to read the article, here you go from Anand:

If you're looking for nothing more than a purchasing decision let's put it simply: if you're not an overclocker, do not buy any Prescott where there is an equivalently clocked Northwood available. This means that the 2.80E, 3.00E, 3.20E are all off-limits, you will end up with a CPU that is no faster than a Northwood and in most cases slower.

I figured as much before the NDA was lifted. After all, with a 31 stage pipeline, the Prescott was bound to be clock for clock slower than it's previous incarnations.

This only makes me wonder. If a 4ghz Prescott is going to be much like a 3ghz Northwood, is AMD going to adjust its PR Rating to the new cores that Intel has? This will only end up confusing things, as a newly rated A64-3400 will be faster than a "Higher numbered" intel version.

Great... Just what we need. More PR confusion.

Re:Thoughts.

[The One KEA]

My biggest beef with Prescott is that Intel rather foolishly lengthened the pipleine and monkeyed with the core design without making the subsequent changes needed to increase clock speed. AMD had it right all along - efficient IPC and low clock speed.

This situation is shaping up, in my eyes, to be a repeat of the release of the Willamette P4 - an inefficient IPC coupled with a low clock speed nearly killed the P4 before Intel could increase the clock speed. The same thing is happening here - another inefficient IPC design with a clock speed equal to the current Northwoods, with subsequent losses in performance. And like another poster here said, the A64 3400+ still beats the Prescott in a number of benchmarks, or ties evenly with it. Despite Anand's statements about how higher clockspeeds increase the efficiency of the Prescott core, I still think that this processor is an expensive upgrade that doesn't do very much.

If Intel can't get the clock speed up on Prescott, I have a feeling that it's going to tank until the LGA775 packaging is finally brought out, which is going to mean more business for AMD and a lot of eggs on Intel's face.

Re:Thoughts.

[Epistax]

The problem is the number of pipeline stages grows as the product is implemented. By the time it's obvious thtat the problem can't be avoided, it's too late to fix it at the low level it needs to be.

I'd really like to address this question fully but I'm currently working on an Intel processor. It hurts me not to type what I want but I know better. ;-)

Re:Thoughts.

[Witsu]

That may be the official case, but I think AMD is planning on consumers comparing the PR rating to an equivalent P4. Notice the geek oriented 64FX has a model number that looks nothing like Mhz, but all the cheaper A64s do. PR ratings are obviously designed to trick the average consumer, to whom clock speed is everything into thinking they are getting a faster chip. Prescott will just mean AMD's model number system will continue to work longer, unlike with the AthlonXP, which often performed alot lower than it's PR number suggested

Re:Slower!!!

[sbennett]

It's marginally slower now, but the margin is less than when the original P4 came out, and for much the same reasons. But then again, the original P4s were designed to run above 2GHz, so they were slow at 1.4GHz. I'd suggest that Prescott is probably designed to be running in excess of 4GHz, so it is slower now than the Northwoods. That'll change once they start ramping up the clock speeds, and the effects of a longer pipeline become less significant.

Will software catch up?

[erick99]

Intel marches steadily on with new chips and planned obsolescence for the old chips. I tend to feel that software is lagging in terms of taking advantage of more powerful and faster processors. I suppose some programs such as PhotoShop can take advantage of faster chips when rendering large and complex files. Still, I think the processors are, by and large, way ahead of software.

Happy Trails,

Erick

Re:from the amd information minister...

[OmniVector]

that doesn't mean much to the average user, who is going to be buying the consumer level chip (like an amd64). opterons and their motherboards currently still fetch a premium and aren't in the average consumer's price range. though at least opterons are more consumer-oriented than xeons in price.

Just suck it up Intel, GIve us what we want!!

[OlivierB]

Is it just me or does anybody have the felling Intel is completly lead by Marketing GHZ frills? Looks to me like they didn't make the most efficient chip, they just designed a straight shooter for 4/5 GHZ. We all know their current P4 Extreme are real Power hogs and not all that efficient. Thus my question, why can't they focus on delivering a 9nm version of the Pentium M? With it's low consumption and heat they could have surely clocked this big boy in the 3.2GHz area and taken care of AMD. All these benchmarks won't make a difference as Mom & Pop will go to COMPUSA and be this computer is Faster-than-3Ghx-because-it's-a4-Ghz. Time to get some AMD stock

Re:Just suck it up Intel, GIve us what we want!!

[Mr. Piddle]

We all know their current P4 Extreme are real Power hogs and not all that efficient.

Reflecting on the recent SUV craze in the USA, this really isn't hard to understand. However, markets do change--just look at the newer generations of station wagons labeled "crossover" SUVs. People are realizing that they never really wanted a 10,000lb SUV all along, and we're moving back to the early 80's super-practical family mover.

One thing that hasn't penetrated in the computer markets is that 100W CPUs really can cost tens of dollars per year in extra power consumption relative to more efficient CPUs. Now that computers are getting well under $1000, those tens of dollars might not seem so trivial any longer. I predict we'll see the current no-holds-barred CPUs move aside for more reasonable ones by the end of the decade as the computer markets mature.

Re:Slower!!!

[maraist]

That'll change once they start ramping up the clock speeds, and the effects of a longer pipeline become less significant.

I disagree.. I think that the performance enhancements were due to factors other than the lenghtened pipe and fast clock.. The clock merely compensates (currently badly) for the added [wasteful] buffers, longer latency, and deminishing marginal return on a single enhanced variable (clock-speed).

Intel needs to create a market for it's higher priced CPUs.. So by having a nominal performance chip, they can increase the other variables (cache performance being a big one), and thus charge an enormous premium.

I believe that they could go a long way to enhance the performance of their existing P4 archtecture, but they need more marketing power.. They don't want to waste time/money advertising Pentium 5. Additionaly, the "extreme-edition" moniker on a similarly clocked CPU is going to be a hard-sell. Thus they will make the most money on clock-enhancements.

AMD has the potential to capitalize on this by getting a higher benchmark rating, virtually for free, so I don't really see this as a big win.

The only issue is that it's cheaper to design a CPU with more stages than to optimize a lower-stage-count to get more Instr/sec. So AMD might not be in a position to get a truely faster cpu out any time soon, and relabeling their existing CPU's won't go over very well.

The funny thing is...

[Maelstrom696969]

...that of course, Intel just keeps ramping up processor speeds in order to improve performance. They don't seem to know any other way to do it.

When AMD shrunk the pipeline and started waking people up to the fact that there's other ways to skin a processor than just upping the clock, that was bloody revolutionary. But yet, not only did Intel not abandon the narrow-minded "higher clock=faster" mentality with Prescott, they have actually fed it by making it so that they HAVE to make higher clock speeds in order for Prescott to perform at peak optimization and efficiency! Sheesh.

Trust me, I'm of course not saying that higher clock speeds aren't better - just that AMD has proven in the past that there's other things that can be done besides that, and it's just a matter of time before they come up with something else to beat Intel down with, IMHO.

---A witty .sig proves nothing.

Re:The funny thing is...

[angle_slam]

Intel already knows that processor speeds don't necessarily mean performance. See, e.g., Centrino.

Power dissipation: 89-103 Watts

[wirelessbuzzers]

89-103 Watts max power dissipation

Ick. That's gonna hurt.