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
So, what’s being launched today?
Intel has dropped one hell of a package on our doorsteps today and we’ve made it through all of the architecture, but can we make sense of their marketing? We kid, we kid, it’s not all that bad.
Intel wants to shift all Pentium 4s over to Prescott as soon as possible, mostly because once production ramps up it will be cheaper for Intel to make a 112 mm^2 Prescott than it is for them to make a 131 mm^2 Northwood. Therefore Prescott launches at clock speeds that are equivalent to currently available Northwoods.
In Intel’s usual style, if there are two different cores with the same clock speed Intel will use a single letter to differentiate them. In the case of Prescott the magic letter is ‘E’, so all ‘E’ processors will mean they are Prescott based.
Prescott is being launched today at four clock speeds, giving us the following:
Pentium 4 3.40E
Pentium 4 3.20E
Pentium 4 3.00E
Pentium 4 2.80E
But don’t get too excited, the 3.40E chip isn’t actually available yet and to make up for that fact Intel also released a Northwood based 3.40GHz Pentium 4. The Northwood based Pentium 4 3.40GHz is currently available, but within the coming months you’ll see them replaced with Prescott based 3.40Es.
In an interesting move by Intel, Northwoods and Prescotts at the same clock speed will be priced identically. Intel is hoping that the price parity will make people choose Prescott over Northwood (why not? You get twice as much cache for free!) but this policy also works in our favor. In order for most vendors to get rid of Northwood inventory you can expect prices to be cheaper than Prescotts.
With a BIOS update these ‘E’ CPUs will work on currently 875/865 motherboards, but check with your motherboard manufacturer first to make sure. We will have a motherboard compatibility article out as soon as possible to document any combinations you should stay away from.
Today Intel is also introducing the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition running at 3.4GHz. This EE is based on the same 0.13-micron process as its predecessor; although there are currently no plans for a 90nm Extreme Edition you can expect one to appear once Prescott begins to approach Extreme Edition performance.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
104 Comments
View All Comments
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?
===
"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)