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

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: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

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