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SpeedStep On Your Desktop - Intel's Prescott-2M
Kez writes "Intel's Prescott core has undergone a few changes, and the latest version - Prescott-2M - includes new features, one of which is Enhanced SpeedStep technology. Given the jokes about the heat that the Prescott gives out, Intel had to act. It was inevitable that a power (and heat) saving technology such as SpeedStep would find its way into desktop PCs. HEXUS.net has an article looking at the new Prescott-2M based Pentium 4 660 and Extreme Edition 3.74Ghz CPUs, examining their new features and performance."
...why should it be? AMD used to have heat issues, and they managed to find a way around them. To me, this almost seems like cheating on Intel's part. And what are they going to use as the excuse to "step down" a processor I paid to have run at a certain speed? With a laptop, they have the "save battery" excuse, which is a valid one (but still over-ridable by the user) - what's the desktop equivalent? The fact that they can't cool their processors is definitely not a good "excuse".
not bother to upgrade.
I mean the whole idea of a faster CPU is to get more work done. So, why buy one and then let it idle most of the time?
No, that is what Thermal Throttling does. On the new processors it drops the processor down to 2.8GHz, not half speed, so it is a little better in that regard if the cooling solution used isn't adequate.
SpeedStep has always been Intel's answer to AMD's better on paper PowerNow! system, known as Cool'n'Quiet on the desktop. AMD's Cool'n'Quiet clocks down to 1GHz, whereas Intel's merely clocks down to 2.8GHz again, so whether the savings are the same or not is questionable.
Intel has apparently not posted SPEC numbers for these processors, and in fact seems to avoid publishing official SPEC numbers for non-Xeon processors. By contrast, AMD does post SPEC numbers for the FX-55, and the Opteron 252 results were available the day the chip was announced. The comparison between the latest Opterons and Xeons is none too flattering for Xeon although the 2MB cache should help the SPEC FP numbers quite a bit. The problem for Intel is that P4 still consumes gobs of power and produces a lot of heat even when it isn't doing anything. By contrast, the Athlon 64 3000+ (90NM) that I'm typing this on maxes out at about 65W, which is roughly the P4's idle power consumption. This machine torches the 2.6GHz P4 machine I have at work at compiling and running Java programs (of course, I'm running Fedora Core 3 here, and Win2K there so it isn't apples to apples). It is hard to see how Intel is going to cool 2 such cores on a single die whereas AMD shouldn't really have a problem. Note, that I'm not particularly an AMD fanboy. I have a couple of Dual Celeron boxes and a Dual PIII box, but Intel took a very wrong turn when they went the P4 route, and I don't see anything that indicates that they are getting back on track. The multimedia performance is nice, I gues, but realistically, how many users spend the bulk of their time encoding video?