Intel's Pentium 4 570J - Will 3.8GHz do the trick?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 14, 2004 10:56 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
With the 570J being the last desktop Pentium 4 launched in 2004 (once again, not counting the Extreme Edition), it looks like AMD will close out this year on top, which is fitting considering how strong AMD has been throughout the entire year.
Looking at the performance of the Pentium 4 570J it's clear that had Intel launched the 4GHz Pentium 4 things would have been much more competitive than we first thought. AMD would still hold the crown in gaming performance, but Intel would have been able to pick up a lot of lost steam in other areas and continue to solidify leads in content creation, 3D rendering and encoding applications.
We're still being cautiously pessimistic about the types of performance gains we'll see from the upcoming 600 series of CPUs from Intel. As you may have already read, Intel is planning on doubling the L2 cache of Prescott and launching a new 600 series of CPUs next year. With twice the L2 cache Intel will attempt to get most of the benefits of an on-die memory controller, mainly reduced memory access latencies, without actually implementing one. We've seen the positive impact this can have with Intel's Extreme Edition chips, but even then, it may not be enough. Raw clock speed is what the Pentium 4's architecture was designed for, and only that will give Intel a commanding lead - unfortunately for them 3.8GHz does seem to be the end of the road for quite a while.
The performance paradigm will eventually shift to being more depending on multithreading capabilities, but that transition is far from being complete, especially on the desktop. It may end up being that Longhorn in 2006 is when we start to reap the benefits of more than just clock speed with every processor release.
Right now we couldn't be happier with AMD, they are more on top of their game today than they ever were with the Athlon XP and the Athlon 64 platform is by far the most attractive platform AMD has ever had. We've seen AMD offer leading performance in the past, but never have they commanded such a strong lead for such an incredible length of time. If AMD could have repeat of 2004 next year the few companies that still don't take them seriously enough may finally come around.
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mrdudesir - Monday, November 15, 2004 - link
Great idea including the Benchmark summary tables at the beginning of the article. I for one don't like having to always comb through the benchmark tables and pick out each specific test when its just a new processor being introduced. Keep up the great work guys.thebluesgnr - Monday, November 15, 2004 - link
To include IE render times you have to keep in mind that it's also very dependent on the chipset. If you really wanted to compare the two processors ideally you would use two motherboards with the same southbridge (SiS, VIA and now ATI).jimmy43 - Monday, November 15, 2004 - link
A lot more often than i make spreadsheets in excel.KristopherKubicki - Monday, November 15, 2004 - link
jimmy43: Although IE render time is a good test, Windows startup times seem kind of pointless. How often are you restarting your PC?Furthermore, virus scans are almost entirely bottlenecked on the HD.
Hope that helps,
Kristopher
jimmy43 - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link
Personally, I would love to seem some actual real world benchmarks such as these:-Windows Xp startup times.
-Internet Explorer startup/render time.
-Virus scan times
-THOROUGH multitasking tests.
I really dont understand why these are not included. Most uses will spend 90% of their time doing such tasks (except gaming, where AMD is the obvious leader) , and as such, these benchmarks are CRUICIAL. Obviosly, one can extrapolate results for these from synthetic benchmarks, but i personally would much rather see real world benchmarks. Thank you!
skunkbuster - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link
i personally never put too much stock in synthetic benchmarksbut thats just me
Xspringe2 - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link
Woops sorry wrong comment section :)Xspringe2 - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link
Do you guys plan on testing any dual opteron nforce4 motherboards?stephenbrooks - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link
Well saying their recommendation is split doesn't mean to say it's split _equally_. ;)KeithDust2000 - Sunday, November 14, 2004 - link
Anand, you say "Had AMD released a 2.6GHz Athlon 64 4000+ Intel would have had a more difficult time with the 570J, but given that things are the way they are our CPU recommendation is split between the two."I don´t think it´s a good idea to recommend the 3.8Ghz P4 at this point. While A64 still has the advantage of Cool´n´quiet (while INTEL has rather the opposite), apparently INTEL thinks 64bit support (and Cnq)
is important enough to introduce for desktops next quarter. As you know, 64bit can e.g. speed up applications like DIVX encoding by 15-25%, others even more, and will give a performance advantage of roughly 1 speed grade or more rather soon. Not taking that into account, and recommending the rather future-unproof 3.8 Ghz P4
doesn´t seem wise at all. You´ve seen in the Linux tests as well what AMD64 is capable of. Buying a 32bit CPU for more than $600 now just looks like a dumb idea at this point.