Intel's Pentium 4 3.4GHz Processors Reviewed

EconolineCrush writes "In one of the most gratuitous benchmarking indulgences I've seen, Tech Report has tested Intel's new Northwood and Prescott Pentium 4 3.4GHz processors against sixteen competitors ranging from the relatively old school Athlon XP to the opulent Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, with plenty of Athlon 64 action thrown in for good measure. Performance is tested in a wide range of applications, including gaming, rendering, image processing, media encoding, speech recognition, and scientific number crunching. Even if you're not interested in Intel's latest Pentium 4s, the review nicely shows where 18 of the fastest desktop chips from AMD and Intel stack up against each other."

Comments

Initial observations

[Pidder]

A quick glance on the system setups shows that they have used RAM with almost the same CAS-latencies in all the setups. The AMD CPUs benefit from low CAS to a greater extent than the P4. When an Intel fanboy site like Tomshardware wants the p4 to beat the Athlon they usually use very slow ram on the Athlon setup, which is of course overlooked by most consumers.

Re:Initial observations

[drinkypoo]

I've certainly noticed that people are more or less willing to take for granted that two things are true about AMD processors. One, they do more per cycle. This should be clear, anyway, because they have more functional units and the functional units are more flexible. Also they have the credibility of having built a multitude of RISC designs over the last few years, most of which have had x86 emulators on the front of them of course. Well, and the back, it wouldn't do to fetch and never retire. Anyway Two, they are much cheaper than intel processors. Sadly intel outstripped AMD in terms of bus bandwidth some time ago and AMD is just now catching up again with the processors with integrated memory controllers - Since that is separate from the bandwidth used to the north bridge. It seems that HT should give about 1/2 the performance of the P4's FSB, but since it doesn't have to carry information from the CPU to main memory (FX-53 has a DDR 400 dual channel memory controller, which should be plenty of memory bandwidth for anyone. Of course DMA still has to occur via HT but in most cases this should not be a serious problem. (Using system memory for AGP textures will still be slow, though of course still faster than loading them from disk all the time.)

So, the hot AMD processor (FX-51) currently beating up on the hot intel processor. The FX-53 is even more destructive (about 10% faster still) and I doubt that it will be substantially more expensive than the P4 EE 3.2GHz 2MB cache, which is already defeated in the benchmarks by the FX-51.

So yes, with the release of the Hammer-core processors, it is unusual for intel to be able to keep up with AMD these days - As it was with the Athlon before it. Remember when the Athlon's double-pumped bus made it two or three times as fast (in terms of FSB) as the intel processors? And how intel processors had less cache, and typically slower cache? Since the release of the K6 intel has been running scared, even in spite of the K6's many flaws. The Athlon was the real sign that AMD was ready to compete with everyone, that's really an amazingly slick chip and there's a multiprocessor version, so AMD targeted basically every space below supercomputing with that processor, and had good success with sales nearly everywhere. (Actually the K6 sold quite a few units also.)

Re:i havent read the article

[tttonyyy]

does it actually have nay insightfull comments, or things we havent heard of already or is it pretty much like the previous cpu review made:
This Just IN, NEW CPU FASTER THAN OLD CPU

Nothing exciting really. Summary is basically this: Amd for 3D games, Intel for MP3 and DivX encoding (and marginally for some scientific software). At the end of the day it all depends what software is running, so there's no clear way to define which is "better" for the masses.

Nothing changes there, I guess.

Summary of the article

[heironymouscoward]

1. AMD64 is better for games
2. Intel Northwood P4 3.4 is good for general use.
3. Intel's new Prescott is too hot.
4. Whatever you buy will be redundant in 2 months.

Plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme chose.

Re:Pretty poor LinPack performance...

[maswan]

Assuming you stay within the hand-tuned codes that are available. You won't see anything near that performance from compiled code, and that's with a good compiler. I've done some tests myself, and the G5 performes about the same clock-for-clock as the Opteron. And these days, the Opteron clocks a bit higher...

LaGrande?

[slux]

Has everyone already completely forgotten about LaGrande?

The tech sites certainly don't seem to be making much fuss about the fact that Prescott has this technology already in it. I wonder how they can be that unknowing of it. There was this big Extremetech article on LaGrande though.

Even on Slashdot no-one seems to be bringing it up these days. For me, the benchmarks aren't even worth looking at with the knowledge that these processors are the beginning of the DRM revolution. Seems they're being able to sneak the technology inside every PC just as they've planned it.

Still, sticking with AMD is going to be just a temporary measure. Is there any talk about integrating DRM into the PowerPC? If not, maybe the next motherboard upgrade could be a Pegasos or one could just go with a Mac.

The parent post is rant and biased.

[yudan]

You'd better look at the results from TomsHardware before starting to rant about it. They are clearly drawing the conclusion tht AMD is better than Intel. Do NOT bring your biased personal taste toward other websites up here!

Re:Missing 400Mhz....?

[DigiShaman]

Some games (and 3D benchmarks) will be bottle-necked by the video card, leaving the CPU with spare CPU cycles to burn. Also, the benchmark may not require much general processing by the CPU, thus all the burden is pushed over to the video card.

Case in point. I was playing Warcraft3 on my P4 2.8 (with Radeon 9800 Pro). Though my framerate dropped down some at high resolution with 4x anti-aliasing, my CPU was only taxed at 15%. I noticed this after exit the game and looked at the task manager CPU usage stats. I was rather shocked.

Basically, if your a gamer, then your better of spending all your cash on a nice 3D card, RAM amount, then CPU ...in that order.

Re:Throw some G5s into the mix

[thatguywhoiam]

This site compares Macs to Macs... its sort of useful.

This site actually has a German G5 vs. Athlon benchmark posted right now.

Neither one is like Tom's (good or bad)... but its something.

AMD wins.

[Jexx Dragon]

Not only that, but Intel has confessed that 64-bit extensions now lie dormant in Prescott, ready to be turned on in future versions of the Pentium. This fall, Microsoft will deliver a 64-bit version of Windows, and both AMD and Intel processors will run it.

Why are the 64-bit extensions disabled? Linux comes in 64-bit now, which clearly means I'll be buying a Athlon 64 over an Intel. Then agian, maybe I'll just go with a four or eight processor Opteron based system. I here the 8088s are good this year too... If any still exist. Of course, I suppose the review caters to gamers who are stuck with Windows (or WineX, which would probably run pretty quick on a Athlon 64-FX).

Still, I think AMD is in the lead right now, they got the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64-FX out a few months ago and Intel still dosent have one, or... Well they do, but the disabled the 64-bit extensions. Can't forget that they have to use the AMD64 extensions as well.

Short version: Don't bother!

[Junks Jerzey]

Note: I'm not trolling, nor am I an AMD zealot.

Yes, you can't go by raw clockspeed alone, but in this case its close enough. In short, 3.4GHz P4 is THIRTEEN PERCENT faster in raw clockspeed than the 3.0GHz P4. The actual performance increase is less than that. At the same time, BOTH PRICE AND POWER DISSIPATION have gone up by MUCH MORE THAN THIRTEEN PERCENT.

Bottom line: This is a completely uninteresting processor at the current time.

Re:Pretty poor LinPack performance...

[jstott]

Taking the opportunity for a moment to troll, flame bait and be an annoying Apple user, I think it's worth commenting how piss-poor the P4's LinPack performance is.

The AltiVec processor on the G5's is a vector coprocessor. If your compiler/library is set up to use it, that's good for a 4-5x increase in floating-point speed. Essentially the CPU does a block of mathematical operations in parallel--Cray mainframes work the same way, only more so. This is different from pipelining in that it's a true parallel operation. I think the AltiVec can do vector integer operations as well, but that won't change the LinPack performance.

Note too that the boost from a vector processor only works on specific types of floating point operations, most notably matrix math, so it's not a magic cure-all. Also, the data has to be in the right format and loaded into appropriate registers, so it helps to have code written specifically to use vector operations (although a good optimizing compiler can still do a lot of the work for you)

.

-JS

Re:Speed

[ionpro]

That's hardly true any more. Any modern game will allow you to set AI difficulty/AI CPU time, sometimes seperately. For instance, Battlefield (any variant) allows you to set "Overall bot difficulty" and "CPU time given to AI" (5~25%). I'm not entirely sure, but I believe Unreal Tournament 2004 has a similar setting.

Re:The problem with all these new processors is

[mikis]

This is a troll, right?

"I hate ATX. AT motherboards and cases are bigger, and who needs this fancy PCI and AGP when ISA and VESA are more than enough. Oh, and why replacing AT keyboard and serial mouse with this PS/2 crap?"

One, stuff is smaller. I prefer large cases with a lot of space for drives and cooling (my current project has twelve case fans).

You can fit small board in large case. But you can't put large board in small case. Most people DO NOT need big, ugly gray cases now that everything but CD and HDD is integrated on motherboard.

Two, they are droping PS/2 ports, which I can't live without, since I perfer to leave the USB ports free (even though I rarely use them).

Most of the new motherboards have at least 6-8 USB ports, and USB hubs are like 5$. So what is the problem?

but I'll have to get used of flipping it onto the wrong side to pop her open

Yeah, that will *really* be the problem.

Four, What is this PCI Express?

Replacement for both obsolete 32bit 33MHz PCI and AGP. Try fitting two top of the line (AGP) graphics cards on one motherboard.

Oh, and it is a good way to force you to replace whole machine when you just want to upgrade.

I think his is more informative than yours

[Anonymous Coward]

His points out that the worst the P4 E does is 2nd, in any test and that it wins half the tests outright. This cannot be said about the A64 FX-53, as it comes in 3rd in two tests, falling to both the P4E 3.2 and P4E 3.4 in one test and falling to both the P4E 3.4 and P4EE 3.4 in another. Thus, his wording emphasizes the better results for the P4E 3.4 than for the A64 FX-53.

So I think the wording on that page is fine, although it is clearly far from the only wording you could use to describe the results.

As to the 2% thing, that simply wouldn't be any fun, would it? The performance gains in benchmarks are typically marginal, this reviewer is simplying following the same pattern as every other benchmarker by not calling attention to the fact.