Intel's Pentium 4 E: Prescott Arrives with Luggage
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on February 1, 2004 3:06 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
If you’re looking for nothing more than a purchasing decision let’s put it simply: if you’re not an overclocker, do not buy any Prescott where there is an equivalently clocked Northwood available. This means that the 2.80E, 3.00E, 3.20E are all off-limits, you will end up with a CPU that is no faster than a Northwood and in most cases slower. If you are buying a Pentium 4 today, take advantage of the fact that vendors will want to get rid of their Northwood based parts and grab one of them.
Overclockers may want to pick up a Prescott to experiment with ~4GHz overclocks – it will be easier on Prescott than it is on Northwood. And once you get beyond currently available Northwood speeds you will have a CPU that is just as fast if not faster, depending on how high you go.
When you include AMD in the picture, the recommendation hasn’t changed since the Athlon 64 was introduced. If you find yourself using Microsoft Office for most of your tasks and if you’re a gamer the decision is clear: the Athlon 64 is for you. The Pentium 4 continues to hold advantages in content creation applications, 3D rendering and media encoding; if we just described how you use your computer then the Pentium 4 is for you, but the stipulation about Northwood vs. Prescott from above still applies.
The Pentium 4 Extreme Edition at 3.4GHz does provide an impressive show, but at a street price of over $1100 it is tough recommending it to anyone other than Gates himself.
With the recommendations out of the way, now let’s look at Prescott from a purely microarchitectural perspective.
Given that we’re at the very beginning of the 90nm ramp and we are already within reach of 4GHz, it isn’t too far fetched that Prescott will reach 5GHz if necessary next year. From an architecture perspective, it is impressive that Prescott remains in the same performance league as Northwood despite the fact that it has a 55% longer pipeline.
What we have seen here today does not bode well for the forthcoming Prescott based Celerons. With a 31 stage pipeline and 1/4 the cache size of the P4 Prescott, it doesn’t look like Intel will be able to improve Celeron performance anytime soon. We will keep a close eye on the value segment as it is an area where AMD could stand to take serious control of the market.
The performance of Prescott today is nothing to write home about, and given the extensive lengthening of the pipeline it’s honestly a surprise that we’re not castrating Intel for performance at this point. Prescott is however a promise of performance to come; much like the Willamette and even Northwood cores were relatively unimpressive at first, they blossomed into much sought-after CPUs like the Pentium 4 2.4C. The move to 90nm and a longer pipeline will undoubtedly mean more fun for the overclocking community, especially once production ramps up on Prescott.
Just as was the case with the very first Pentium 4s, Prescott needs higher clock speeds to spread its wings - our data on the previous page begins to confirm this. To put it bluntly: Prescott becomes interesting after 3.6GHz; in other words, after it has completely left Northwood’s clock speeds behind.
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Jeff7181 - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say 2004 is the year of the Athlon-64 and Intel will take a back seat this year unless their new socket will help increase clock speeds. When AMD makes the transition to 90nm I think you'll see a jump in clock speed from them too... and I'm willing to bet their current 130nm processors will scale to 2.6 or 2.8 Ghz if they want to put the effort into it before switching to 90nm.Intel better hope people adopt SSE3 in favor of AMD-64 otherwise they're going to lose the majority of the benchmark tests.
On second thought... the real question is how high will Prescott scale... will we really see 4.0 Ghz by the end of the year? Will performance scale as well as it does with the Athlon-64?
Right now, looking at the Prescott, the best I can say for it is "huh, 31 stages in the pipeline and they didn't lose too much performance, neat."
Barkuti - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
Check out the article at xbitlabs:http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/presc...
Less technical but with a wider set of tests.
Stlr22 - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
;-)Stlr22 - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
((((((((((((((CRAMITPAL))))))))))))))))Listen,I just want you to know that everything will be alright. Really, life isn't all that bad buddy. It's not good to keep so much hate inside. It's very unhealthy. We are all family here at the Anandtech forums and we care about you. If you ever need to sit down and talk, I'm ll ears pal. So that your brother doesn't feel left out, here's a hug for him aswell.......
(((((((((((((AMDjihad)))))))))))))
KF - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
Yeah, the Inquirer was right about 30 stages. Maybe I should start reading it! However I did read the one where the news linked to an article purporting that an Inquirer reporter had bumped into a person who had overheard an Intel executive say Prescott was 64 bit. Maybe Derek and Anand didn't have the space to squeeze that tiny detail into the review.I saw a paper on the Intel site a while ago, seemingly intended for some professional jounal, the premise of which was that it is ALWAYS preferable to make the pipeline longer, no matter how long, while using techniques to reduce the penalties. Like, 100 stages would be a good thing. Right then I knew what one team at Intel was up to. The fact that they didn't explain any new penalty reduction techniques only made it all the more sure what Intel had in the works (otherwise why write the paper?), and that they had the techniques worked out, but still under wraps.
ianwhthse - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
Err.. *CramitpalSorry about that. My mind is wandering.
ianwhthse - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
Did we actually just get 26 good posts in before crumpet showed up?FiberOptik - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
I like the part about the new shift/rotate unit on the CPU. Does this mean that prescott will be noticeably faster for the RC5 project? Athlon's usually mop the floor with whatever the Northwood can pump out.eBauer - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
"Botmatch has bots (AI) playing, shooting, running, etc. (deathmatch) while Flyby does not. The number that you should be most interested in is the Botmatch scores."No, I am talking about the botmatch scores from previous articles. Well aware of the difference between flyby and botmatch. http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1946&a... In that article, all CPU's had about 10 more fps than the CPU's in the prescott article.
AnonymouseUser - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
"I am curious as to why the UT2k3 botmatch scores dropped on all CPU's... Different map?"Botmatch has bots (AI) playing, shooting, running, etc. (deathmatch) while Flyby does not. The number that you should be most interested in is the Botmatch scores.