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[evolucion8]

Originally posted by: Turbonium
And I'm not sure what you mean with the Prescott. Northwood cores are faster clock for clock than the Prescott when it comes to gaming afaik, due to the shorter pipeline.

The improvements made in the Prescott core are towards multi threading, while is true that Northwood has a shorter pipeline and higher IPC, it also run out of execution resources faster than Prescott when Multi Threading is used, in such scenarios the Prescott is marginally faster than Northwood even though its 31 stage pipeline its quite deep for a CPU.

 

[Turbonium]

Originally posted by: evolucion8
The improvements made in the Prescott core are towards multi threading, while is true that Northwood has a shorter pipeline and higher IPC, it also run out of execution resources faster than Prescott when Multi Threading is used, in such scenarios the Prescott is marginally faster than Northwood even though its 31 stage pipeline its quite deep for a CPU.

Is this due to the smaller cache?

If so, then why is the P4 EE still inadequate? It had another 2MB of L3, right?

 

[evolucion8]

When I upgraded from the Pentium 4 3.40GHz Northwood to the 3.40GHz Gallatin aka EE, that barely made a difference with my CPU scores or gaming performance, it made the games a bit smoother because the big cache helps with the memory access, but Pentium 4 architecture doesn't benefit greatly of bigger caches like the Core architecture (Neither the AMD K8), the improved things in Prescott are beyond of simply bigger caches, it had one of the best branch predictors ever designed on a CPU which was later incorporated on the Core architecture, also the cache had higher associativity, a better scheduler and better integer performance. That's why its performance wasn't much worse compared to Northwood in single threaded scenarios, otherwise the 11 additional stage pipelines of Prescott would had made it much slower than Northwood.