New Intel P4 CPU reviews

[Asus]

Pentium 4 (Prescott) 3.2E
Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (Gallatin) 3.4

Reviews:

Tom's Hardware
Tech Report
[H]ardOCP
Anandtech
FiringSquad
Xbit Labs

Xbitlabs has an interesting multitask evironment test and only on the hardest test did the P4 win.
Even if you normally skip Tom's Hardware especially on Intel reviews because of believed 'bias', read this one.
All I can say is the increased L2 cache size (512kb to 1mb) saved Prescotts ass for now.

 

[He@t!]

nice..time to read

 

[$pazmatazz]

All I can say is the increased L2 cache size (512kb to 1mb) saved Prescotts ass for now.

Actually this isn't the case at all. The cache size increase apparently increases latency, but will be more rewarding with future software. What saved their ass was all the improvments to the processors micro-architecture, considering Prescott's pipeline is now 31 stages long (Northwood was 20).

Intel just set themselves up well for the future. Prescott is basically identical in performance to Northwood, but can scale all the way to 5GHz. Their revisions to Hyper-threading will come with OS updates as well. I also found it pretty impressive that Anandtech effortlessly overclocked their 3.2GHz Prescott to 3.7GHz with only air cooling.

 

[crabcakes66]

doesnt look impressive....

 

[OCybrManO]

Increasing the pipeline increases latency and if an error occurs late in the pipeline more time is wasted because it has to start over from the beginning. Though, it helps in the long run. At least, that's what I keep hearing.

 

[Asus]

Well actually look at P4 EE. A major increase with 2mb L3 cache and Prescott has 1mb L2 cache (Up from 512 on the Northwood).
L2 is faster than L3 though with only slightly increased latency for Prescott. Would you like to see a Prescott with 512kb L2 cache? That would be even more scary.

"Anyone thought about how utterly unimpressive it is to have a new core with 150% (!!!) more transistors, 100% more cache and 50% (!) higher thermal density, and not even outperform the previous core ? I don't care the pipeline was incrased tenfold, it still wouldnt come close to impress me." - bbaeyens from Tom's hardware forums
I completely agree.

The only ones I see possibly liking prescott are the OCers. But then again since Northwood>Prescott clock for clock and a 2.8ghz Athlon 64 is >4000+ rating especially on the 939 socket w/dual channel memory...hmm That leaves me wondering just how great of performance it really has even for OCing.
Of course Prescott is on 90nm and A64 is 130nm with 90nm set for after summer 2004.

Prescott is nothing more than a bridge from the Northwood P4 3.2ghz to Tejas around 4ghz in 2005 or later. The only way to bridge it is increase pipeline to allow for higher clocking. Add SSE3 (only a few more registers unlike SSE2 added) and you have a very marketable chip to the general public.
"New and improved Pentium 4 with added SSE3 technology, 1MB L2 Cache and higher clock speed!"
"Oh hey more cache, another SSE and more clock speed. What a great product."
Later they will ask
"Why is it only getting 60 fps when the old P4 at the same clock got 65 fps?"
I don't think I should even touch on how much extra power it is using or the operating temp.

Another Review
Ace's Hardware

 

[Arno]

I just read the articles from HardOCP and AnandTech. Interesting stuff. The AnandTech article gave very in-depth information. It seems that the first Prescott models just serve as a bridge from the 130nm to the 90nm chips. At the surface, there's not much change in performance. But the overclock headroom becomes a whole lot bigger, which gives hope for the future. Especially considering AnandTech noticed that the Prescott shows better clock-for-clock results when running at higher clockspeeds.

 

[Asus]

Xbitlabs had the best graphs/benchmark suite and conclusion but anantech had the best info before the benchmarks. IMO