Intel's latest P4 chip hard to get, PC makers say

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Buy AMD: Intel's new Prescott-based P4 XE 3.4 barely shades an Athlon 64 FX-51 in raw performance, yet costs $200 to $250 more. It only beats AMD's best in benchmarks for a very few games, and that's it.

I'd love to see a comparison with a dual-processor Athlong 64 3400+, the two processors cost less than a single P4 XE 3.2 or 3.4 and would probably beat them both.

And AMD has not moved to 90nm yet.

The only real difference is that applications using hyperthreading do run faster on Intel CPUs but that just highlights the performance hit that Intels very long pipeline imposes on the rest of the CPU. There are very few applications that have been optimised for HT, but maybe it will be more important in the future.

Try this:

"However, there is quite a bit of games where even the performance of Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz is not enough for successful competition with AMD CPUs. The four diagrams above are all examples illustrating this point: Unreal Tournament 2003, Gun Metal, X2 ? The Threat and Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness. Moreover, in three of these four games we see that Pentium 4 processors on the new Prescott core perform slower than Pentium 4 processors based on the older Northwood core. The only exception is Tomb Raider, where Prescott core manages to show its best.

As a result, we have to admit that Northwood core performs better in contemporary games than the new Prescott. In other words, now that the maximum working frequencies of Pentium 4 processors on Northwood and Prescott are the same, it makes more sense for gamers to decide the older Northwood, which stood successfully the test of time. Even though the new core boasts larger cache-memory and a number of other improvements, it performs slower in most cases because of the too long execution pipeline. However, if we also consider the offerings from AMD, it becomes absolutely clear that Athlon 64 processors will win the gamers? hearts, because their price-to-performance ratio in 3D games is considerably more attractive today."

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/prescott-tests_5.html

AMD continues to beat any of the Intel chips in real-world business and multimedia performance. Seems to reinforce the idea that Intel tunes their chips and compilers for benchmark performance that is not realised in general use.

So why waste the money on Intel?; Posted by: Fred Fredrickson Posted on: 04/12/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use