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.
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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.