Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz: One step closer

Final Words

With AMD planning to hit 1.6 – 1.7GHz by the year’s end, the potential for Intel to regain the performance crown with a 2 – 2.2GHz Pentium 4 by Q4 is a very likely outcome judging by what we’ve seen here today from their 1.8GHz part and from our overclocked 2.0GHz test system. 

For the most part, the Pentium 4 at 1.8GHz is able to remain competitive or offer greater performance than the Athlon 1.4.  The real question happens to be at what cost, and unfortunately for Intel, the Pentium 4 can’t provide a suitable answer to that one.  With cheaper 4-layer motherboards set to appear on the market and no longer a requirement for a new case (just a new PSU which you’ll need for an Athlon system as well if your unit is not powerful enough), the cost of upgrading to a Pentium 4 system isn’t as great as it once was but it’s still pretty significant.  Considering the price of RDRAM in comparison to DDR SDRAM and the pricing gap between the Pentium 4 1.8 and the Athlon 1.4, it is still a very difficult sell for Intel although it is getting easier with each and every step.

We’re still going to suggest waiting for Northwood (0.13-micron Pentium 4) and see how that pairs up with a DDR platform (i845 or VIA’s P4X266) later this year before jumping on the Pentium 4 bandwagon.  Northwood will also be introduced as a Socket-478 CPU (instead of the current Socket-423) which should decrease packaging costs a bit as well and offer a more long term upgrade path since Socket-423 is destined to fade away. 

On the AMD side of things, the Palomino core definitely has its strengths although they seem reserved for mainly 3D applications and games.  In a lot of the content creation/office application tests the performance advantages were just not there, making the regular desktop Athlon a much better single processor option.  If you do decide to go with the Athlon MP for your desktop system do keep in mind that there is no official support for that type of a configuration from AMD and very few motherboards currently even support the CPU although the MSI K7T266 Pro worked fine with it.

And there you have it, another CPU release that begs the question “what do we need all of this performance for?”  There are certain communities that laugh whenever that question is asked because they can always use the performance (e.g. scientific, 3D rendering, etc…) since their applications can take hours and even days to run on today’s processors.  But for the rest of you, with Windows XP coming around the corner, the subsequent XP editions of all of your software and newer games taxing systems even more than before, you can expect your system to begin to feel slower than usual as you start upgrading your software. 

There’s your justification but then again, no one in this community ever complained that something was too quick for their liking…