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
Availability, Yields and Overclocking
Intel’s 90nm fabs are working hard at cranking out Prescotts as fast as possible, but as is the case at the start of any ramp there will be supply issues. We are hearing that widespread availability of chips in the channel for people like us to order won’t be until March 1st, although you should be able to find OEMs with systems available immediately.
We are also hearing from reliable sources that the current steppings of Prescotts coming out of the fabs are performing very well. To get an idea for what sort of headroom to expect we conducted some informal overclocking tests on our Pentium 4 3.20E that we had for testing.
We conducted all tests using just air cooling and we kept the CPU voltage at its default of 1.385V:
An effortless overclock gave us 3.72GHz; we could POST at 4GHz but we didn’t want to showcase what was ultimately possible with Prescott, rather what was easily attainable without increasing voltages.
Intel could have launched Prescott at higher clock speeds than they did, however it seems that their desire to produce as many mainstream Prescotts as possible (2.80E in particular) won out in this case.
Update: Intel has released the official thermal data on Prescott:
| Thermal Design Power | |
|---|---|
Northwood (2.8 - 3.4GHz) |
69 - 89W |
Prescott (2.8 - 3.4GHz) |
89 - 103W |
As we mentioned before, if you thought Prescott was going to be cooler running you'd be wrong. Prescott is one hot running CPU, now keep in mind that these aren't actual production thermals rather Intel's guidelines to manufacturers as to what thermals they should design cooling for. Needless to say, Prescott at 2.8GHz will be about as hot as a 3.4GHz Northwood. When Intel ramps up beyond 3.6GHz we'll definitely see some larger heatsinks being used on Pentium 4 platforms; some of the preliminary cooling setups we've seen for Tejas were insane.
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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.