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

Speed

[Peden]

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?

Re:Speed

[Kjella]

Many non-game apps are CPU bound, and speed is always desired in these situations. Examples include rendering, video compression, SETI@Home, etc. Likely you don't need a faster processor, but it doesn't mean that the business world sees it the same way. Heck, maybe some day these processors will power your graphics card too!

Not to mention, many of the games are CPU-bound because of the minimum specs - you can up the gfx from 640x480x16bit -> 1600x1200x32bit, but there's no setting the AI to "dumb -> average -> smart". I'm sure there's lots of interesting ideas in AI (groups, formations, tactics, responses to movement/sound, distractions etc.) or game world design (i.e. things happen to the world around you, not just what's being rendered on the screen) that'd love to have more power to throw at it.

Kjella

Missing 400Mhz....?

[inphinity]

Besides this test being ridiculously comprehensive, did anybody else notice the stat differences between the P$ 3.0 Ghz - 3.4 Ghz?

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?

Heat

[shawkin]

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.

Throw some G5s into the mix

[oingoboingo]

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.

Scale matters!

[IceFox]

After reading it I get the following:

1) If you are doing anything in Lightwave by all means don't use AMD's XP :) There must be some major tweak they are missing.

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

AMD64 testing

[ValourX]

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

-Jem

compiler comparison

[pwagland]

Hmm. Just had a quick browse of the article, and noticed something a little funny. In the Sphinx speech recognition test they compared all of the chips with both the microsoft and the Intel compiler. What was strange about it though was that for every AMD chip the Intel compiler was faster, by up to 4%. However, for 7 out of the 10 intel processors the microsoft compiler produced faster code than the intel compiler!

Bizzare eh?