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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."
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?
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?
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!
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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.
That is possibly one of the most bizzare comments to be marked interesting, just because a new form factor comes out, it doesn't mean that the processor companies will dump all the current chips.
True they may have a new package for some of the processors to fit a new slot or modified mb chipset, but that is nothing new, we don't just chuck out all the old work when something new comes along.
c.
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.