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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.
The most interesting characteristic of these new P4's is IMHO:"
"On the other hand, Prescott is looking at some massive increases in latency, the access latency for the Level 1 cache has quadrupled, and the Level 2 cache accesses are approximately 50% slower." -- Lost Circuits
Intel better ramp up that clock and/or have everyone optimizing for SSE3 if they want to dominate the benchmarks.
Suggested mod-limit: 3, Interesting
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Can I overclock it to 5 HGz ?
Prescott will be like the P4. It will be slow in the begining as they milk every mhz stepping they can but will slow start to shine when they pump up the MHZ.
Its a shame but that is how it goes and went with the P4 it need more speed to be able to show it true worth.
It would be nice if they said screw it and just released it a 4.0
You have to ask the question!
With the Athlon 64, IA64 and G5 vying for the 64bit market, and Athlon offering native supports of 32-bit binaries. Why would anyone want a new series of Pentium 4E?
Is Intel feeling that Athlon may be about to make leaps and bounds in the small business/desktop market?
Has anyone done a test of the AMD64 running a 64 bit OS vs P4 running a 32 bit OS? Say Linux. To see the difference when they full power of the chip is taken advantage of. Especially with rendering. It may be a little like comparing Apples and Oranges but comparing these 2 chips can be that way. And to throw in a 32 bit OS on the AMD64 chip isn't really fair to it's power. It's not really using the full potential of the chip.
Evolution or ID?
I don't like the mentality that just because CPUs are faster that means software should bloat itself up more and more so that you HAVE to have the fastest chips just to run your OS. What crack are you smoking man? The fact that software isn't keeping up is a GOOD thing IMHO. I mean think about it, it means that we can do everything we need to do and have plenty of room to spare. This leads to greater multitasking as you can do many many things at once and not get bogged down. It means you games will run smoother, even if you have programs running in the background.
:-P.
I personally do NOT want to see software makers TRYING to push CPU limits just for the sake of pushing them. We will just end up with a bunch of useless "features" that no one wants or uses and it will be just like all the cell phones out there
Normal people will continue to buy middle of the line stuff and will continue to say "gee, this is much faster than my old machine" which is how it should be. If they got new software with that new machine that used up all the cycles then it wouldn't feel much faster and there wouldn't be much point in buying it now would there? And there are plenty of people that will always have the "It can't be too fast" mentality. ie. gamers, multimedia people (images and movies), scientific computing, rendering farms, and I am sure lots more. I personally think things are on track.
Prescott is the assistant to the navigator in Moby Dick, and he is known for being excellent at making rapid computations.
It seems that both AMD/Intel are trying to double everything in a single CPU, such as L1, L2, even DDR to DDRII :). I just wonder why they have lack product lines of dual-CPU systems for main consumers? Their SMP solutions are either very high-end not going to face main consumers, or fading to the market because of slow enough (both of them always have unresonable prices).
For most people, the most areas Pentium4/Althon XP take advantages are 3D applications, data servers, and some scitisfic applications. However, a SMP system with two main stream processors also can achieve the simpilar(just slower a little bit) scores. Those applications always can be implemented through parallel approaches. (I believe it already have done this during the designing time....).
For example, for SMP solutions, I have to choose between Operton and Althon MP, but in actually I want a dual-althonXP with the double prices. I think that such system is what many other people really want to buy insteading of investing massive money on new processor/cooling system for better performance.... I believe there is not a big technical matter for this just trying to force us follow their single processor upgrading ways....
"Why spend billions, when you can spend millions?"
The way it works is that an XP2600+ is 2.6 times faster than a 1GHz Duron,
a 3000+ is 3 times faster than a 1GHz Duron, etc.
This is according to "PC Hardware in a Nutshell" 3rd edition (O'Reilly).
Can anyone back this up with a reference from AMD?
*sigh* back to work...
Does anyone here remember the early Pentium 4 1.4 and 1.7 GHz chips built on the Socket 423 form factor? With only 256 KB of on-die L2 cache and few programs (at that time) that could take full advantage of the Pentium 4's SSE2 multimedia extensions, small wonder why the CPU was much-disliked originally. It wasn't until Intel came out with the newer Pentium 4's with the 512 KB L2 cache and software that fully took advantage of SSE2 extensions that the CPU finally took off in popularity.
I don't see the Prescott-core CPU's become popular until software catches up with supporting all the functions of the CPU; we may see that with Windows XP Service Pack 2 and later builds of the Linux 2.6.x kernel.
Actually, I think software should take advantage of this. Perfect example -- my Transmeta-based laptop hardly ever runs at more than 300 Mhz as reported by Longrun. Occasionally it spikes up at full speed at 933 Mhz. Even playing a DVD or an MP3 requires no more than 300-500 Mhz. Heck, even with other programs running in the background!
My point is that unless the software takes advantage of the extra speed, the extra speed is meaningless in most situations. Most applicaitons won't feel any different between a 500 Mhz machine and a 2 Ghz machine... Users don't write their instant messages any faster.
Games should and do take advantage of faster processors.
Handwriting recognition, voice recognition, gesture recognition, biometrics, etc. should all take advantage of the faster procesors. Otherwise, software is in fact lagging...
AMD had it right all along - efficient IPC and low clock speed.
Of course you don't see any AMD chips that are *clearly* head and shoulders above Intel in benchmarks, though. Maybe a few percent faster here, a few percent slower there. It's all just noise.
it is quite interesting that the new prescott core has a lower latency for the caches and higher stage pipeline.
but given the fact that a big percentage of decrease in latency from existing northwood cores and big increase in pipeline does not reduce the speed *significantly.* it can still compete with the current northwood with a small drop in performance on a clock per clock basis.
given these things, i think the cpu may be designed quite well given its current performance with numerous internal slow downs. i'm sure in their next core, they will be able to reduce the latency by significant amounts and increase the branch prediction system thereby causing their future cpus to perform better than current iteration.
i believe the current purpose of prescott is to do a couple of things. first, refine their 90nm processing of the cpu. they will be able to iron out manufacturing bugs (like yields.) they will also be able to improve in the design of the cpu (to put minor revisions to improve the manufacturing or even performance.) they will be able to earn more (since 90nm should product more yields for them.)
probably, i believe that in around 1 year's time, just like their transition from williamete to northwood, their cpu will be much faster. they should be able to solve the latency of their cache. they may already adopt a very good branch prediction unit that will reduce the effects of a very long pipeline.
also, this year will be a transition year of technologies. so pretty much everything you buy not will almost be worthless by next year. the cpu packaging will be changed to lga. slots in the computer will feature pci express. i/o will be standardized with usb. storage devices will be sata. intel will be prepping up for speed wars next year. (i think this usually happends every other year where there is a speed war and there is a slow increase in speeds by both sides.)
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
SSE2 *had* to be used in many apps to get decent performance, since the FP performance sucked. SSE3 on the other hand are very few instructions - and if you look at the DivX 5.1.1 benchmarks that supposedly is using the new LDDQU instruction, it can't even beat the equivalent Northwood.
The rest also sounded like "special interest" functions, much like many of AMDs 64 bit extensions. Great for specific uses like scientific calculations and cryptography, not that much for general computing. Cache is already quite high at 1mb, if you look at die size any higher would seriously add to Intel's costs.
The only real promise there was the ability to ramp up speed, though that's not a bad one. But then again, there's no doubt AMD has things to match. One being the switch to x86-64 with more registrys, two being the move to 90nm process, third getting dual channel DDR support on their AMD 64s (the FX I consider a special interest processor for the time being) and so on.
Bottom line? Looks like the CPU market will remain highly competitive for quite some time to come, for the good of all us consumers. But I didn't see any figures on Prescotts power consumption, anyone see it? I imagine a 5GHz Prescott would start to drain a *lot* of power (= cost, noise, heat)...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They got it the other way around, but that's more or less correct.
A 1GHz Duron is roughly the same speed as a 1GHz Athlon Thunderbird since the 1GHz Duron was the then newer "Morgan" cores (which came out with the Athlon XPs). Benchmarks then showed that 1GHz Morgan Durons ran more or less at the same speed as the older 1GHz Thunderbird Athlons.
The increase in performance mostly came from the additional SSE instructions present in the 1GHz Morgan core Durons. Yep, especially since Quake III makes heavy use of SSE Instruction sets and used to be Intel-centric
I don't want to bother slogging through AMD Tech specs, but the PR numbering system I rattled of was from a rough memory of reading AMD tech specs over naming conventions with their Performance Ratings.
"Basically, looks like it's faster, but still not the fastest in all areas."
Just what definition are you using for the word "faster"? To my eyes, it's slower than the older Northwood core in the majority of real-world situations, clock-for-clock. If you're talking about absolute performance, then it's significantly slower than, say, the AthlonFX CPUs. Even the biased-as-hell airbags at Tom's didn't have much good to say about this CPU. That's not to say that it wont see strong performance gains as applications are recompiled to support the new features (SSE3 et al) of Prescott, but I don't have the slightest idea where from where your statment comes based upon the reviews and benchmarks published thus far.
You make it sound like it's a superb new chip that outperforms almost every other chip on almost every application. That's criminally wrong.
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