Intel's Pentium 4 670: Just Another Speed Bump
by Derek Wilson on May 26, 2005 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Introduction
Today, Intel is launching a couple new processors. Anand has already taken an in-depth look at the Pentium D 820, so we won't be going into detail on that piece of hardware in this article.The newest and fastest of the single core parts from Intel is their Pentium 4 670, which runs at 3.8GHz. As this is just a bump in speed from the already available 6xx line of processors, there really isn't anything new to cover architecturally.
Understandably, we aren't incredibly excited about the launch of a simple 5.6% higher clocked chip that will carry a nice price premium without offering many tangible benefits. But don't worry - we will still put the 670 through its paces in our lab. Even if the part is unreasonably priced and not compellingly advanced in its performance characteristics, we will always be interested in understanding and illuminating the hardware landscape.
As this highly clocked part comes to market, we can start to see even more clearly the advantages that dual and multi core will bring. Where a 200MHz clock speed increase used to be huge back in the day of the 1 and 2 GHz processor (a 20% and 10% improvement, respectively), at 4GHz it is not only harder to squeeze the extra speed out of a part, but the return on investment is extremely limited. In order to continue getting the same performance boost from part to part, we would need to see processors launching in 400MHz increments or more to really be worth it.
Dual core has already shown us that it has the ability to deliver performance gains at lower clock speeds that sometimes exceed what we can get from much higher clocked single core parts. We can't ever see a linear increase in performance per core added to a system, but the potential is much higher than a small clock speed increase. That is, until we start adding fewer cores on single silicon than we could MHz. At that point, to see performance gains, technology will need to open another option to us.
The Pentium 4 670 is almost a legacy part at its introduction. It's too expensive, doesn't offer a major performance improvement over other processors, and is single core. So the question we will lead off with is: why should we care?
Let's take a look at the benchmarks and see if they give us a reason to care.
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bob661 - Friday, May 27, 2005 - link
Since you're here Jarred. Was the tested 4000 a San Diego core? Thanks much.bob661 - Friday, May 27, 2005 - link
#16There ARE San Diego core 4000's. Check here:
http://tinyurl.com/cdy8m
JarredWalton - Friday, May 27, 2005 - link
Certain benchmarks are not 100% repeatable. WinStones, SysMark, WorldBench, etc. can all vary by a decent amount. While running multiple benches does help a bit, you can still end up with some odd results. I've seen variance of 5% on some benchmarks, for example. I don't know about the WinZip and Nero results, though - it looks like some other hardware or driver provided for a major change.flatblastard - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
#10 "don't forget, a 200 MHz increase with AMD cpus is like a 300+ MHz increase for intel"#13 Also consider the fact that 200 "A64 Mhz" aren't equal to 200 "P4 MHz"
I am aware of this, and I will now make you aware of the fact that I can afford to have 10 less FPS.
Tujan - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
""Or does an endorsement by the Blue Man Group wash away all sins? :) ""............Nay think its a matter of reviewers not being aware of when the next shipment of bananas is going to come in.
A load of bull can be a load of bull sometimes.
Tujan - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
Is lower or higher 'better for the Sysmark Data Analysis scores ? The 670 got 183"". [ ]Weird how the AMD Athlon 3400+(2.4/512/1ch) did so badly in the Specviewperf 8- Pro/Engineer Performance Engineering and SolidWorks Viewset....
I was trying to tell how well a given processor would do,so bliping on the AMD Athlon 3400+(2.4/512/1ch) I thought that would be a good processor to have,now is that a 754 platform processor/motherboard.
Couldn't find same range processor from a retailer in 939 wich would only show it in 754?
[ ]
Somebody here said 1ch/2ch is dual channel ? The benchmark setup did tell of using the 754,lest an Nvidia SLI is one of those ?
SLIM - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
Heres another request for some kind of explanation about the very odd scaling amongst the 6xx series chips especially in the PC Worldbench results.mjz - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
14 - the 4000 is an FX 53 without the multi.. it is not a san diego core.bob661 - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
Also, could you guys include an Autodesk Inventor or Mechanical Desktop bench?bob661 - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
Does anyone know if the 4000 used was a San Diego core? Thanks.