Price Guides, August 2005: Labor Day CPUs
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Howard Johnston on September 4, 2005 4:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Intel Pentium 4
With IDF just wrapping up we have a lot to look forward to over the next year in Intel's lineup. That being said, since our last guide we haven't seen anything very exciting on Intel's current product line. The EM64T enabled CPUs are out in full force on the retail channel; however, jumping on the 64-bit bandwagon this early may not be such a good idea given the current driver support in Windows x64. Oh yeah, and dispite what anyone says, 64-bit doesn't make your games run faster.
The Prescott-2M chips are now a viable option relative to the 1MB parts, as their prices have dropped to parity with the lower cache models. The problem is that the 2MB cache actually runs with higher latencies, so in many instances performance is the same as the earlier parts. 6xx has always come with 64-bit support enabled, so now the choice is for less faster cache, or more slower cache. There are instances where the 5xx parts win, but for the same price most people will want the 6xx model. You can get full benchmarks in our 6xx performance review.
We're
still waiting to see the Prescott-2M with virtualization start shipping by the
end of the year. Hopefully when they arrive
they'll drive the rest of the 6 series Pentium lineup down in price. Until then, we can't recommend these
processors especially when compared to their Athlon 64 counterparts. (Remember, though, that Intel traditionally doesn't drop non-value chip prices below $175, choosing to discontinue production at that point.)
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highlandsun - Tuesday, September 6, 2005 - link
I suppose; for noobs it would just mean they can spread viruses/worms twice as fast.The turbo analogy is good, you've hit another topic near and dear to my heart. :P
(Of course with a properly sized turbo, "lag" is mostly a non-issue.)
Chapbass - Sunday, September 4, 2005 - link
lol, im assuming you mean dual core...your topic said dual but the post said single... : )As of right now the big push for dual core is for those (like myself) that multitask alot. Yeah, its not a good idea to multitask while gaming and such, but it would be nice to be able to do whatever while im say, burning a dvd with dvdshrink. Or i suppose (depending on how powerful they are, as i dont own one) I could actually probably game while burning a dvd... who knows maybe someone with a dual core can chime in.
I'm sure that once the big name companies start pushing it then software companies will start coding for it.
Bona Fide - Sunday, September 4, 2005 - link
Well, a lot of workstation applications already are SMP/SMT-aware, since most workstations are built off of Xeon or Opteron setups, which are usually dual or quad processor. Apps like Photoshop, CAD, and 3dStudioMAX all are optimized for dual-core. Here's a complete listing.http://www.denniskarlsson.com/smp/">http://www.denniskarlsson.com/smp/
Does anyone think that AMD's dual-core offering will match up with Intel's any time soon, in terms of price?
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ = $350
Pentium D 820 2.8 = $250
Athlon 64 X2 4200+ = $475
Pentium D 830 3.0 = $350
Athlon 64 X2 4600+ = $690
Pentium D 840 3.4 = $540
Furen - Sunday, September 4, 2005 - link
AMD's 3800+ is a match for the D 830 performance-wise, so the chart should be shifted like this:Pentium D 820 2.8 = $250
Pentium D 830 3.0 = $350 Athlon 64 X2 3800+ = $350
Pentium D 840 3.4 = $540 Athlon 64 X2 4200+ = $475
Athlon 64 X2 4600+ = $690
The problem with AMD (right now) is that they dont have a low speedgrade, and I'm sure this is a purely yield-related Issue. Intel can make cheap because they have much more capacity than AMD (something fab36 will hopefully help AMD deal with) and because they can just slice off a core if it turns out to be defective, effectively making their failed Dual-cores into single-core variants (this is because event hough the 2 cores are on the same die, they are simply side-by-side for the most part).
JarredWalton - Monday, September 5, 2005 - link
Actually, you still don't have the price table correct.1.8 GHz 3000+ ~= Pentium 3.0 GHz
2.0 GHz 3200+ ~= Pentium 3.2 GHz
2.2 GHz 3500+ ~= Pentium 3.4 GHz
2.2 GHz 1MB 3700+ ~= Pentium 3.6 GHz
2.4 GHz 3800+ ~= Pentium 3.8 GHz
(Yes, I AM fudging on what each CPU "equals". The fact of the matter is that in most instances, the 3000+ is actually faster than a 3.0 GHz P4, and that applies to the others as well.)
So, 2x2.0GHz 3800+ is really equal to 2x3.2GHz Pentium D 840. There really is not Intel match for the 4200+ and above parts - the 4200+ is faster in almost every case than even the 840D Extreme Edition. (Tests under Windows XP with four CPU-intensive tasks will put the 840 EE ahead, but that's a Windows scheduler problem.)
joex444 - Tuesday, September 6, 2005 - link
No, the 2x2.0GHz 3800+ is closest to an 830 (2x3.0GHz). The 840 is faster in most benchmarks.It's a little difficult to compare the two, really. The P4 was always faster than the Athlon (64) in certain apps, mainly encoding, while the Athlon was always faster in other things (like everything else, especially gaming). When you put two cores on one PCB, however, things can change. The Athlon X2's design is more advanced than Intel's. AMD really thought it out and made it backwards compatible with Socket 939, at the cost of memory bandwidth rather than invent a new socket. Intel instead requires a new motherboard that offers no real new features other than Pentium D support.
Basically, if you already have a Socket 939 board, it would make more sense to grab an X2 as an upgrade rather than jump ship and go Pentium D. You have to add the cost of a motherboard, something that everyone buying a Pentium D needs, so Intel can offer the chip at a lower cost somewhat, because they are also selling a Northbridge/Southbridge (whatever they decided to call it, that's what they really are). They also put next to no tech design into the Pentium D, little research money comparitivley. They literally glued two cores together and changed the northbridge/BIOS to support the chips. The architecture map shows it, the two cores go through the FSB to talk to each other, just like in a dual Xeon system which has two independent sockets. AMD's cores don't hit the FSB to talk, which can help out in many situations. Unfortunately for AMD, Intel's 800MHz FSB is still fast enough to run two 3.0GHz chips fast enough to compete. If Intel only had DDR FSB (effectively a 400MHz bus) I don't think they could have come out with the Pentium D at the speeds they did. Fortunately for Intel, in their quest to produce the 3.8GHz chips, some fall short, way short, like 2.8 or 3.0, and when you pair them together, glue them together (we saw the IDF pic of a chip w/o it's heat speader) and call it a Pentium D, it works really well for them.
If you had a P4 now, though, it probably makes more sense to get a Pentium D, unless you were looking for leading edge, in which case the 4600+/4800+ (if you just have to have 1MB L2 for each core) is your target.
IDK where I'm going here, so...yea.