anandtech Prescott review NOW UP! (anand inside)

[Schadenfroh]

text
coming now to a store near you

31 stage pipeline:Q

 

[Adul]

we need an its official, 31 stages!

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
its up!

:Q

 

[jdogg707]

looks like a great overclocking chip. Anyone know where to find one now? I know the article said March 1st, hopefully someone will get them out before then.

 

[Adul]

there are a few places with it.

 

[Alkaline5]

There's certainly not much to get excited about either way with this launch. For the time being, a Pentium 4 is a Pentium 4, I guess.

 

[jdogg707]

Spartan Technologies has them, seem to have a fai, but not great Reseller Rating of 7.02 Lifetime. I don't know whether to ditch my Athlon 64 3200+ / MSI K8T Ne-FISR2 combo for a Pentium 4 Prescott 3.0GHZ / Abit IC7-Max3 combo...decisions...haha

 

[Adul]

Originally posted by: jdogg707
Spartan Technologies has them, seem to have a fai, but not great Reseller Rating of 7.02 Lifetime. I don't know whether to ditch my Athlon 64 3200+ / MSI K8T Ne-FISR2 combo for a Pentium 4 Prescott 3.0GHZ / Abit IC7-Max3 combo...decisions...haha

I think you'd be nuts to do it.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: Adul

Originally posted by: jdogg707
Spartan Technologies has them, seem to have a fai, but not great Reseller Rating of 7.02 Lifetime. I don't know whether to ditch my Athlon 64 3200+ / MSI K8T Ne-FISR2 combo for a Pentium 4 Prescott 3.0GHZ / Abit IC7-Max3 combo...decisions...haha

I think you'd be nuts to do it.

please do not enter anandtech without your sarcasm detector

 

[andreasl]

Intel should have had a backup plan with a Northwood/1MB on the 90nm node. Or perhaps do a 3 level cache design. 8/256/1M or something. It would have been smaller, cooler and faster (at least for now)

 

[Ionizer86]

I thought Intel announced plans to have the EE flagship larger cache P4's while mainstream P4C's would move to 1MB L2. That's what I read somewhere. It'd look like this:
P4EE: 8/256/1024
New P4C: 8/1024

 

[jdogg707]

Originally posted by: Adul

Originally posted by: jdogg707
Spartan Technologies has them, seem to have a fai, but not great Reseller Rating of 7.02 Lifetime. I don't know whether to ditch my Athlon 64 3200+ / MSI K8T Ne-FISR2 combo for a Pentium 4 Prescott 3.0GHZ / Abit IC7-Max3 combo...decisions...haha

I think you'd be nuts to do it.

Yes, sarcasm is a beautiful thing...especially at Anandtech...

 

[Macro2]

From Anand, I gotta laugh.

REF:"SYSMark was one of the only applications to show a positive performance improvement for Prescott.


NO KIDDING! I thought every test site had Bapco located at the same address as Intel.



RE:"and we see that with clock speed that advantage continues to grow over Northwood. Keep on reading, it gets even more interesting..."

When they get it over 3.2 GHZ it MIGHT MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

----------------------

Looks like Prescot is a step backward for now. No wonder Intel had to come out with the P4 Extremely expensive edition.

 

[ViRGE]

Humm, interesting; Anand doesn't expect the Prescotts to become widely availible in the retail channel(i.e. Newegg) for another month.:Q

 

[andreasl]

Originally posted by: Macro2
From Anand, I gotta laugh.

REF:"SYSMark was one of the only applications to show a positive performance improvement for Prescott.


NO KIDDING! I thought every test site had Bapco located at the same address as Intel.



RE:"and we see that with clock speed that advantage continues to grow over Northwood. Keep on reading, it gets even more interesting..."

When they get it over 3.2 GHZ it MIGHT MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

Anand failed to mention that this improvement in performance scaling is primarily from the increased L2 cache. In fact all other improvements in the core probably just turns up as noise in the scaling benchmarks compared with the bigger L2 cache. A Northwood with 1MB L2 would blow away Prescott completely. Just see what the P4EE does (although it has 2MB L3 instead)

 

[Macro2]

Whens the 3.6 coming out? After the 3.4 in a month or more I presume. Only then will we see the power of the Prescott, hoe yeah!


Did you see anything about 64 bit capabilities?

 

[Macro2]

Anand didn't seem too thrilled. Saying we had to wait for 3.6 GHZ is basically a bad conclusion of Prescott at this time.

 

[GTaudiophile]

One word: Meh.

I'll continue to be patient until 12/04 or 01/05 when it's time to do a major upgrade.

 

[Budman]

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
One word: Meh.

I'll continue to be patient until 12/04 or 01/05 when it's time to do a major upgrade.

yes I agree,I will not upgrade until I can be sure to have at least 5ghz.

2.4c @ 3.2ghz is fast enough for me,for now

 

[Shagga]

Is the P4 EE stopping at 3.4GHz?

 

[Pandaren]

Performance is pretty mediocre. I've looked at the AnandTech benches as well as the benches from Tom's and Xbitlabs.

Clock for clock performance seems roughly equivalent. Prescott's technological tricks mainly keep the IPC from taking a big hit from the 31-stage pipeline.

OEMs will like the chip because they won't have to pay extra $ for it. I think Intel knows enthusiasts won't be happy with the numbers, and this is why it will take time for the CPU to ship in volume to resellers.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Shagga
Is the P4 EE stopping at 3.4GHz?

yes

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Pandaren
Performance is pretty mediocre. I've looked at the AnandTech benches as well as the benches from Tom's and Xbitlabs.

Clock for clock performance seems roughly equivalent. Prescott's technological tricks mainly keep the IPC from taking a big hit from the 31-stage pipeline.

OEMs will like the chip because they won't have to pay extra $ for it. I think Intel knows enthusiasts won't be happy with the numbers, and this is why it will take time for the CPU to ship in volume to resellers.

It is EXTREMELY impressive to increase the pipeline 55% and keep performance the same. I'm going to wait for the chip to get ironed out then get a good step 3.2ghz to run at 4.0ghz on default voltage just like i did with northwoods.

 

[Acanthus]

Anyone else think it was weird that the P4-EE dominated the benchmarks today? It was a draw between A-64 and P4EE last i knew.

 

[zephyrprime]

Now our 10 stage CPU can run at 2GHz, but at 2GHz we?ll have the exact same performance as the first CPU at 1GHz. Remember that although we?re running twice as fast, we have twice as many stages to make it through so the overall throughput is the same as the first 1GHz design.

Wait a second. I think this is wrong. The 10 stage pipeline cpu will have higher throughout. Can anyone clarify this?

being the intelligent CPU designers that we are, we would only extend the pipeline to 10 stages if we knew that we could make each clock period shorter than 0.5ns. And let?s say we do accomplish that, that we can get the clock period down to 0.33ns. Now design 2 can reach 3GHz, while design 1 can only reach 1GHz.

I think this is also wrong. Doesn't an increase in pipeline length by a factor N result in a less than factor N increase in clockspeed because there's a certain amount of additional circuitry needed to interface adjacent pipeline stages?