Prescott 2.8 vs. Northwood 2.8 for my application

[cmetz]

I have a specific application for which I think the Prescott might be the right choice. I know that there's a lot of anti-Prescott sentiment around here, so all I can do is ask that folks refrain from the "Presc0t sux0r" kinds of responses.

My application is mostly I/O. Single-threaded, not much control transfer. It is sensitive to FSB (800FSB = good) and to memory bandwidth. For the latter, I'm thinking that doubling the cache size is a very good thing. I am not overclocking.

Is there a good reason why Northwood would be better than Prescott for this application? I know that for general purpose and esp. games, benchmarks are showing that Northwood beats Prescott clock for clock, but that's not quite what my application's about.

 

[Conky]

Heck, go for it. You seem to know what you need. Why ask for approval?

 

[Verdant]

for memory intensive applications, my guess would be to stick with the northwood, the slower cache will probably be your bottleneck... but this depends on your application's size... if active code can fit inside the 1MB L2 prescott Cache, but not the 512kB northwood cache, prescott might be right for you... but alas, i am still skeptical.

 

[Acanthus]

The northwoods shorter pipeline has an advantage in the case of a misprediction. The pipeline is shorter so the penalty isnt nearly as great. Without knowing the exact nature of the application i cant make a valid preidction though, as i can only speculate as to what kind of I/O youre running.

 

[cmetz]

How much slower is the cache on the Prescott on a hit? One clock? That could be an interesting trade-off.

 

[Verdant]

Originally posted by: cmetz
How much slower is the cache on the Prescott on a hit? One clock? That could be an interesting trade-off.

L1 is 2-4x more cycles
L2 is about 1.5x more cycles

the differences in cache are better highlighted in Anand and Derek's article on this page
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1956&p=8