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
Prescott's Little Secret
In learning about Prescott and trying to understand just why Intel did what they did, we came to realization: not only is Prescott designed to be ramped in speed, but there was something else hiding under the surface.
When overclocking a processor, we can expect a kind of linear trend in performance. As Northwood's speed increases, its performance increases. The same is true for Prescott , but what is important to look at is increase in performance compared to increase in clock speed.
Prescott 's enhancements actually give it a steeper increase in performance per increase in clock. Not only can Prescott be clocked higher than Northwood, but as its clock speed is increased, it will start to outperform similarly clocked Northwood CPUs.
We can even see this trend apparent in our limited 3 clock speed tests. Most of the time, the 2.8GHz Northwood outperforms the 2.8GHz Prescott, but the percentage by which Prescott is outperformed decreases as clock speed increases, meaning that the performance delta is significantly less at 3.2GHz.
Business Winstone 2004
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
1.48% |
3.00GHz |
0.00% |
3.20GHz |
0.46% |
Content Creation Winstone 2004
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
-3.57% |
3.00GHz |
-5.67% |
3.20GHz |
-5.43% |
SYSMark 2004
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
1.19% |
3.00GHz |
2.27% |
3.20GHz |
2.70% |
SYSMark was one of the only applications to show a positive performance improvement for Prescott, and we see that with clock speed that advantage continues to grow over Northwood. Keep on reading, it gets even more interesting...
Aquamark - CPU Score
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
-2.87% |
3.00GHz |
-2.47% |
3.20GHz |
-0.84% |
Halo
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
-0.18% |
3.00GHz |
-0.18% |
3.20GHz |
0.00% |
GunMetal
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
-0.29% |
3.00GHz |
-0.58% |
3.20GHz |
-0.29% |
UT2003 - Flyby
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
-2.62% |
3.00GHz |
-1.46% |
3.20GHz |
-0.86% |
Clock speed goes up, Prescott performs more like Northwood.
UT2003 - Botmatch
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
-3.55% |
3.00GHz |
-3.09% |
3.20GHz |
-2.05% |
Warcraft 3
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
1.96% |
3.00GHz |
1.12% |
3.20GHz |
0.72% |
We continue to see that as clock speed increases, the gap between Prescott and Northwood decreases as well.
Quake III Arena
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
-1.33% |
3.00GHz |
-0.49% |
3.20GHz |
1.28% |
Quake becomes the textbook case of what should happen to Prescott performance as clock speed increases; although initially it is slightly slower than Northwood at 2.80GHz, by the time we reach 3.2GHz Prescott holds an advantage over a 3.2GHz Northwood. This is exactly the trend we expect to see over time, especially once we get close to 4GHz.
Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
-7.63% |
3.00GHz |
-6.85% |
3.20GHz |
-7.04% |
Wolfeinstein: Enemy Territory
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
-5.53% |
3.00GHz |
-4.94% |
3.20GHz |
-3.79% |
DivX Encoding
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
-1.30% |
3.00GHz |
-0.61% |
3.20GHz |
-0.38% |
3dsmax R5
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
-9% |
3.00GHz |
|
3.20GHz |
-9% |
There will be some scenarios that do not work in Prescott's favor, and in those cases Northwood will still remain faster.
Lightwave 7.5
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
-7.7% |
3.00GHz |
|
3.20GHz |
-6.8% |
Although to a much lesser degree, we are seeing the same sort of scaling with clock speed in applications like Lightwave. It looks like our theory about Prescott's performance is correct.
Visual Studio Compile Test
| Percentage Increase in Performance from Northwood to Prescott | |
|---|---|
2.80GHz |
-8.2% |
3.00GHz |
|
3.20GHz |
-3.8% |
Much like Quake, our compile test is another perfect example of what clock scaling will do to the Northwood/Prescott gap. As the clock speed goes up, the performance delta decreases.
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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.