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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mattsaccount - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
From the HardOCP review: "Certainly moving to watercooling helped us out a great deal. In fact it is hard for us to recommend buying a Prescott and cooling it any other way."eBauer - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
I am curious as to why the UT2k3 botmatch scores dropped on all CPU's... Different map?Pumpkinierre - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
Sorry errata on #20 that was 3.0 Northood result is out of kilter with other cpus in dtata analysis sysmark 2004.Pumpkinierre - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
JFK,Vietnam,Nixon,Monica,Bush/Gore,Iraq and now this! - what is going on with the leader of the free world.I hope it overclocks well- that's all that's going for it. Maybe Intel should rethink their multiplier locked policy. AMD must get in there and profit. I still dont understand why the caches are running at half the latency as Northood if they are the same speed and structure? Is it as a result of a doubling in size for the same associativity?Good article- needs re-rereading after digestion. Last chart in Sysmark2004 (data analysis) has 3.0 Prescott totally outperformed by 2.8 Prescott and all other cpus. Look like a benchmark/typing glitch.
yak8998 - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
first the error:pg 9 -
The LDDQU instruction is one Intel is particularly proud of as it helps accelerate video encoding and it is implemented in the DivX 5.1.1 codec. More information on how it is used can be found in Intel’s developer documentation here.
No link?
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"What's the power consumption like on these new bad boys?
Is anything less than a quality 450watt PSU gonna be generally *NOT* recommended?? "
I'm going to guess a clean running ~350W or so should suffice for a regular system, but I'm not positive with these monster gfx cards out rite now...
"Any of you know what the cache size on the EE's will be?"
If your talking about the Northwood (the p4c's are still considered northwoods, no?), its 1mb I believe.
(still finishing the article. man i love these in-depth technical articles)
Tiorapatea - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
I agree, some info on power consumption please.Thanks for the article, by the way.
I guess we'll have to wait and see how Prescott ramps in speed versus 90nm A64.
AgaBooga - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
Much better than the P4's origional launch...All I want to know now is what AMD is going to do soon... They'll probably counteract Prescott with high clock speeds but when and by how much is what matters.
Any of you know what the cache size on the EE's will be?
Also, the final CPU's based on Northwood are kind of like a car with the ratio curves or whatever they're called, but basically after a point of revving, going any higher doesn't give you as much of an increase in speed as it would at a lower rpm increasing the same amount.
Cygni - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
AMD's roadmap shows a 4000+ Athlon64 by the end of the year... which is the same as Intel's. They are aware, im sure.Stlr22 - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
What's the power consumption like on these new bad boys?Is anything less than a quality 450watt PSU gonna be generally *NOT* recommended??
HammerFan - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
Things are gonna get hairy in '04 and '05!!! My take is that AMD nees to get their marketing up-to-spec or the high-clocked prescotts are gonna run the show.I have a question for Derek and Anand: What kind of temps does the prescott run at? what type of cooler does it have? (there's nothing there to support or refute claims that the prescott is one hot potato)