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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."
once BTX comes out, they'll all be more or less redundant, unless the BTX manafacturers somehow make them compatiable, which I doubt is very likely.
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
While all that processor speed is mighty good, who needs top-of-the-line equipment anymore? The new games all rely on the GFX card rather than the CPU. Any suggestions, other than the fact that Intel is keeping up to Moore's law?
I thought Intel was killing their label of chips by speeds...
Davak
Or, more precisely, the lack of differences?
I wonder, is this just an inability of benchmark software to challenge a processor at such a high clock speed, or are these processors actually the same thing with shinier packaging?
Thoughts?
With the case open, this thing runs at 178 degrees. In a practical sense, all the other benchmarks are less important.
It is not going to be easy to cool. It is not likely to be suitable for clustered processing. It is not likely to be particularly reliable.
This article illustrates the diminishing returns of the current Intel CPU architecture and processes. Soon, both AMD and Intel will be forced to explore new designs similar to the IBM Power 5.
Given the time, effort and money involved in developing a new CPU architecture, the near and medium term future may lie with IBM.
What I'd like to see in a huge multi-CPU benchmark like this are some Apple G5 systems thrown in too. Decent cross-platform tests are hard to find, but given OS X's UNIX underpinnings, it may be possible to come up with a set of tests that are run on x86 Linux and OS X which have an identical code base, and which do not artificiallly advantage one architecture over the other. One thing I've found since switching to OS X about 6 months ago...the Mac community still lacks a really good site which does solid, rigorous benchmarks of Mac hardware/software...and there are a lot of myths and misinformation doing the rounds on various Mac forums (as there are on PC forums too). A well controlled multi-CPU benchmark including some Macs could go a long way to alleviating this.
The other thing they do is rely heavily on synthetic benchmarks like PCMark. A little while ago the inquirer ran a story that pointed out that a heavily overclocked p4 running at over 4 GHz got impossible low scores on some synthetic benchmarks. This turned out to be because the windows internal clockspeed counter was just 32bits and there was an integer wraparound. What they failed to notice was that this meant that these so called benchmarks were baseing their scores on the reported clockspeed of the processor, and therefore must have favoured intel.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Not saying the G5 doesn't offer better FP performance, but you might try citing some evidence other than what's on Apple's site. They don't exactly have the best track record when it comes to impartiallity (No manufacturer does). Let's not forget "The worlds fastest personal computer" fiasco.
After reading it I get the following:
:) There must be some major tweak they are missing.
:(
1) If you are doing anything in Lightwave by all means don't use AMD's XP
2) Encoding type work XP seems to be the best bang for the buck (right now)
3) I had a difficult time understanding the results because most of the graphs didn't have a scale to go by. Some of them like the games you could figure out that 500fps is twice as fast as the slowest at 250fps, but in either case you didn't care. With lame from the looks of it the slowest was still faster then what I could rip from cd (need to test, but just off the top of my head). Maybe on the larger scale for a particular test all of the cpu's are very close together, but in the view of close up it looks like one is _way_ faster.
4) With all of the tests there wasn't one compiler test
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
We have come upon a point in processor technology that Active cooling other than passive radiant exchange with active air movement technology (IE cooling block and a noisy fan) will be exceeded very shortly. Running at 178 degrees these guys will require active cooling system such as water, refrigerant. But there is a third type of cooling technology that is micro channel cooling: http://www.cooligy.com/micro_channel_cooling.html I would like to see a rock solid active cooling system implemented and run as well as today's fans or even refrigerators. As more money is invested in the area then we will see more active cooling systems.
It seems a little dubious to pit a 64 bit processor (Athlon64) against a 32bit one.
The Athlon64 does surprisingly well in many of the tests, especially when you note that in the majority of benchmarks it is only executing 32bit code. I bet we would see a different story if the Athlon64 was running at its best ability eg running 64bit apps on a 64bit os.
How difficult would it be to do some benchmarks comparing two identical linux distro's running on the same processor but one compiled for 32bit and the other compiled for 64bit. That might be an interesting comparison.
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Yet another review that doesn't test in 64-bit mode.
I don't know why this wasn't deemed Slashdot-worthy, but here's an excellent review of a P4 3.2E versus an Athlon 64 3200+ in both 32-bit *AND* 64-bit mode:
AMD64 vs. i386 in FreeBSD
-JemBizzare eh?