Intel's Pentium 4 E: Prescott Arrives with Luggage

Business Winstone 2004

With our very first look at Prescott performance, we see that despite the long pipeline, cache latencies and other performance impacting attributes, Intel has managed to do a good job of keeping performance of their new flagship processor right on par with Northwood in a very important catagory: business productivity software.

This might not be the benchmark most enthusiasts are looking for, but it is very important for Intel. Corporate customers are a big part of the game when it comes to selling desktop parts, and, with more and more companies realizing that AMD is out there, not slipping in performance here is very positive for Intel

Content Creation Winstone 2004

With the second suite in the Winstone series Prescott starts to fall a little bit behind Northwood. The type of computing done in common content creation tasks doesn't benefit from a larger cache size (repetative calculations, easily prefetchable data, and easily predicatable branches are very happy with even smaller cache sizes). When running similar code, Northwood and Prescott will have about the same number of pipeline stalls. Stalling the 31-flavored pipeline hurts Prescott more than it does Northwood, and that's where the performance drop comes from.