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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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)