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

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