Prescott vs northwood: Prescott vs. Northwood — Doom 3: CPU Battlegrounds

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IndexHow does CPU Speed Impact Graphics Performance?The BattlegroundsPrescott vs. NorthwoodAMD vs. AMDCeleron D vs. SempronAMD vs. IntelFinal Words

Battle 1: Prescott vs. Northwood

The first battle of our Doom 3 CPU Comparison occurs between the two Pentium
4 cores: Prescott and Northwood.

You may remember from our
review of Prescott that the new 90nm core was hard
pressed to outperform its 130nm Northwood predecessor. Although Prescott featured
twice the cache of Northwood, its longer pipeline and similar clock speeds
held it back in most performance tests. However, Prescott does have one major
advantage over Northwood — twice the L1-D and L2 cache. In other games
the added cache has not been able to do much for Prescott, but let’s
see how that changes under Doom 3:

How the tables have turned — Prescott is actually faster than Northwood
for a change, and at the same clock speed. A 7% performance advantage over
the regular Pentium 4 3.2C is not too shabby for Prescott, but how can we be
sure that the performance advantage is solely due to the cache size advantage?
Look at the Extreme Edition.

The 3.2GHz Extreme Edition shares the same core as Northwood, but features
a 2MB on-die L3 cache, and manages to outperform Northwood and Prescott by
15% and 7% respectively. These first benchmarks foreshadow what is soon to
come and bring about a realization that Doom 3 is quite possibly the most memory/cache
dependent game we’ve ever benchmarked.

The standings remain the same at higher resolutions, but as we’ve see
the 6800 Ultra becomes mostly GPU limited at 1280×1024, reducing the impact
of these processors. The Extreme Edition still manages to be 10% faster than
Northwood, and Prescott continues to hold a lead over Northwood, just not as
much at the higher resolution.

The last thing we wanted to look at in the Northwood vs. Prescott battle was
how the two CPUs scaled — as we mentioned in our original Prescott review,
we expected Prescott to do a better job scaling with clock speed than Northwood
and we are beginning to see examples of that here in Doom 3:

Although it’s ever-so-slight, Prescott’s performance does seem
to scale with clock speed better than Northwood.

The winner of this battle is clearly Prescott, we’re sure Intel’s
happy that there’s finally a situation where Northwood isn’t in
the limelight.

The Battlegrounds
AMD vs. AMD
IndexHow does CPU Speed Impact Graphics Performance?The BattlegroundsPrescott vs. NorthwoodAMD vs. AMDCeleron D vs. SempronAMD vs. IntelFinal Words

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Review: Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz Prescott, 3.4GHz Northwood and 3.4GHz Northwood Extreme Edition — CPU

Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz Prescott, 3.4GHz Northwood, and 3.4GHz Northwood Extreme Edition

The enthusiast may be under the false impression that Intel really, really cares about having the fastest consumer-level CPUs. Intel’s near-$30-billion turnover in 2003 dwarfs its arch-rival’s, AMD’s, by a factor of close to 10, and Intel has an x86 CPU market share in excess of 80%. That’s an enviable position to be in. 2003 also saw an unstinting rise in technological stocks. Intel, naturally, gained back some of the market capitalisation that it lost, like everyone else for that matter, when the frenzied stock bubble burst in 2001. In short, Intel is doing good.

You wouldn’t think the above facts were true if a company’s evaluation was strictly based on the the performance of its top-of-the-line processors. AMD’s new 32- and 64-bit processors, which go under the names of Opteron, FX-5x and Athlon 64 Model 3xxx, respectively, are all similar in design and performance. The naming structure reflects the market in which each family of processors is to operate. Whatever the name, it’s hard to get away from the fact that the Athlon 64 is an altogether impressive CPU. Clever engineering, forward thinking, and excellent 32-bit performance has put AMD, in many commentators’ eyes, comfortably at the top of the consumer CPU tree. The impressive Pentium 4 3.2GHz Northwood CPU doesn’t look so formidable now. In fact, when considering the Athlon 64 FX-51 / Model 3200+ and Model 3400+’s performance in the enthusiast sphere of gaming, the venerable Northwood is beginning to look, dare we say it, slow. Slow, it must be noted, is a wholly comparative term.

Intel attempted to redress some of the glaring performance imbalance by launching a special, souped-up Northwood CPU that carried an extra 2MB (lots of transistors, baby) of Level 3 cache. The Extreme Edition, or Expensive Edition as it was later jokingly referred to, used an expensive production method to increase performance. Extreme Editions, by their very nature, will never be within the reach of most enthusiasts’ wallets. We observed that AMD had made a significant performance and prestige leap with the Athlon 64 / Opteron’s inception. We also said that Intel would rise to the challenge with the much-vaunted Pentium 4 Prescott CPU, which, as you may know, is the Northwood’s replacement. Conjecture was rife that it would provide the sorts of performance gains witnessed in the transition between the doomed Willamette and incumbent Northwood. Mr. Northwood, though, is going to go out without a bang. Intel mentioned that it intended on carrying the high-performance line first started by the 3.2GHz Extreme Edition CPU. True to its word there’s a 3.4GHz Northwood-based Extreme Edition with a suitably pain-inducing price tag and extra productivity oomph provided by all those millions of on-chip transistors which make up 2MB of L3 cache.

So three new CPUs from Intel today, including a regular, if you can call it that, Northwood 3.4GHz processor. The Extreme Edition is a known quantity. We reviewed the 3.2GHz version here. The 3.4GHz model is going to be fast, that much we can surmise. Will it or wont it be able to top the Athlon 64 Model 3400+ in the majority of benchmarks ?. That, really, is the most fundamental question we’ll attempt to answer. It’s aimed at a select, deep-pocketed market. That market just wants to know if it is the fastest thing since, um, the Athlon 64 3400+. The Intel Pentium 4 Prescott CPU, on the other hand, is an unknown. It has to be better and faster than the lesser Northwood, right ?. Read on and find out.

Intel Pentium 4 Prescott price, specifications, video review, reviews

Detailed specifications
*

9000
*

9000

Multiplication factor	14 . .. 23
SOKKET	LGA775 / S478
Built -in memory controller	NO
Frequencies of tire 9000 533 MHz / 800 MHz	9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 2400. ..3800 MHz
Core voltage	1.25…1.4 V

Core
*

9Cache
*

Cache volume L2	1024 . .. 2048 KB
divided cache L2	NO
Cache L1	16 KB
L3		0 … 0 Kb

Instructions
*

Optional
*

Heat dissipation

84.