Northwood benchmarks

I have found some Northwood benchmarks run by a third party to which I can link. Since these are links to websites on the public internet and the content was not created by me, I can safely present them here.

What this person has is an engineering sample of a Northwood (0.13 micron) Pentium 4 1.8GHz running with a 141MHz external clock at 2.2GHz. He is running it on an i845 chipset motherboard (an Asus P4B Rev1.03 Bios:1004) because this was apparently the only Socket 478 motherboard he could find in his region that had a BIOS that would support this processor at this time. Other system components include the following: Tonicom PC-166 CL2 256MB TBGA SDRAM Module, Elsa Gladiac 920 GeForce3 64MB DDRRAM, Seagate Barracuda ATAIII 40GB UltraATA/100 7200RPM, Delta 350W PSU, Taisol CEP405092 w/Delta 7*7*1 3000RPM Fan.

Historically, the Pentium 4 (Willamette) coupled with the SDRAM i845 chipset has performed miserably, especially when compared to the Athlon MP/XP 1.4GHz. When coupled with the i850 chipset it has performed about 30% better, making the performance between the Athlon and Pentium 4 processors a bit more even, but still falling below the Athlon MP/XP 1.4GHz in many benchmarks.

I now present these Northwood benchmarks:

<A HREF="http://netcity2.web.hinet.net/UserData/adoli/P4N-2258CPU.JPG" target="_new">CPU Arithmetic Benchmark - SiSoftware Sandra</A>
<A HREF="http://netcity2.web.hinet.net/UserData/adoli/P4N-2258MM.JPG" target="_new">CPU Multi-Media Benchmark - SiSoftware Sandra</A>
<A HREF="http://netcity2.web.hinet.net/UserData/adoli/P4N-2258MEM.JPG" target="_new">Memory Bandwidth Benchmark - SiSoftware Sandra</A>

(These benchmark photos were taken from <A HREF="http://netcity2.web.hinet.net/UserData/adoli/test-5.htm" target="_new">here</A>. Note that <A HREF="http://babelfish.altavista.com" target="_new">http://babelfish.altavista.com</A> has better luck translating it using the Japanese to English filter rather than the Chinese to English filter for some reason.)

Mature comments are welcome.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

If you want more memory bandwidth I suggest going with the i850 platform with DRDRAM. This should boost benchmark scores by about 30% across the board as well judging by current Willamette w/i845 benchmark scores.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

Yes, do not forget that the Northwood is beating the Willamette by about 15-16%while very much handicapped by the i845 chipset with SDRAM. Add another 30% or so from a move to i850 and you get the approximate performance figures of a stock Northwood Pentium 4 2.2GHz. Toss in the fact that they all overclock extremely well (even with air cooling) and you get a processor that could easily leave everything else in the dust.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

All Willamette Pentium 4 processors use 0.18 micron technology.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

I found that, but it didn't have the Sandra CPU benchmarks (like the first review). That's what I'm interested in, to see exactly how much the i845 hampers the CPU itself.

<font color=green>I post so you don't have to!
9/11 - RIP</font color=green>

What caused you to come to this conclusion? Remember that A) the CPU is castrated by the i845 chipset and B) this was not the final Northwood processor. Revisions have been made.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

Die shrinks themselves never increase performance. They simply make everything smaller and cooler and give you more room to add more features to the die.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

Those memory bandwidth numbers look correct for an P4 on a SDRAM platform! As for Northwood I speculate the increase in performance won't be more than 10% with RDRAM 800
not sure when @ 133 Fsb or 533 whichever you prefer.
Hmm so I think a Athlon PR2000+ will be about even with a Northwood @ 2.2 Ghz. All speculation on my part we will have to wait and see what the future holds.

Now if northwood does comeout on the 533Fsb with RDRam 1066 things would be even closer. But an XP on a 166fsb with DDR2700 would be able to keep up if not surpass it.

Once again all speculation on my part. Hmm wasn't expecting the Delay from November to now Q102. That's really close to the next athlon cpu. So if Intel does require the performance lead it won't be for long!

AMD still owns intel clock for clock!

<A HREF="http:////www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=9802" target="_new">http:////www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=9802</A>

Thank you for clarifying the die shrink question Ray. I had read on several tech sites that die shrinks tend to equate to improved performance due the the significantly shorter traces and the like..upwards of 5-10%.

That's why I was asking what can be attributed to what in the Northwood performance improvement.

Mark-

When all else fails, throw your computer out the window!!!

A) Sanda Whetstone/Dhrystone is probably not so bandwidth-dependent. Any sensible benchmark seeking to stress only the FPU/ALU processing power would feed the respective units a dataset small enough to fit in the on-die cache and (though this is more CPU-specific) conforms to best-case scenario for the CPU's caching algorithm.

B) The sample may indeed be old; I actually did point that out. I noted the mod date of the image 'cos that's all we have to go on for the sample's age.

Kelledin

"/join #hackerz. See the Web. DoS interesting people."

Hmmm... I hope the FPU on the released version of Northwood performs a lot better then that. My Sandra score is only 80 points lower and Im running my 1.8 @ 2.1 GHz. Im using RDRAM, but that shouldnt affect the CPU benchmarks. The interger scores are about 400 points higher then my system, no doubt do to Northwood's larger L2 cache. Too bad I cant get my CPU to run reliably at 2.2 GHz for a closer comparison.
Judging from that sample it appears that Northwood is nothing more then a .13 micron Willamette with 512KB of L2 cache.

If you would like to test this, then please do a few tests on your machine using Sandra. I am going to assume you have an unlocked Athlon system. Correct me if I am wrong. What I would like you to do is to run the ALU and FPU tests with a 133MHz FSB and then with a 66MHz FSB. On the second test please raise your multiplier so you stay at the same CPU clockspeed as you used for the first test. We can compare the scores to see what effect a doubling of memory bandwidth has on the benchmark scores. Note that this might give a false reading of 'no significant effect' due to the Athlon not relying as much on bandwidth as the Pentium 4. However, it can safely prove that there is a significant effect if one shows up on these tests.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

Alright then. Perhaps someone else with an unlocked Athlon will do this for us. The only unlocked processor I have is one from which I cannot post benchmark results.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

I have a better idea...let's get something closer to exactly what you want <A HREF="http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/mainboards/ref/viap4x/index5.html" target="_new">here</A>.

I'll see if I can dig up some others from Ace's Hardware.

Kelledin

"/join #hackerz. See the Web. DoS interesting people."

Those numbers are incredibly hard to believe; nearly identical scores for the i845 and i850 on every test (except raw bandwidth)? Nearly identical scores even on the SSE2 tests? Those scores just seem wrong.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

That depends on the processor and the amount of data that is being processed.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

Well, if you cant defend yourself I suggest that next time you dont start another thread with links to amateur benchmarks in China.

I think he's just trying to coerce you into showing us your benchmarks.....which won't happen for 3 months.

Nice <b><font color=green>Lizards</b></font color=green> <b>crunch</b> Trolls cookies....... Yummy!!

Well I do not understand what he was jabbing at really. I believe I pointed out some information that has been widely sought on the Northwood. I would also prefer that someone become friendly before attempting a 'friendly' jab. In a forum things can easily be misinterpretted, especially when the poster is new to the forum.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

Wow.. I didn’t realize that my post would offend you so easily.
The fact is is that those benchmarks which you linked for the rest of us to view show very disappointing numbers for the Northwood processor. You claim that the CPU scores are low because it was run on a 845 platform, but many of us disagree with you. Sandra's CPU benchmarks are NOT dependent on the system platform and only tests the Processor. I believe that Kelledin provided info backing this up.
If you are going to complain that these were benchmarks produced by some amateur in China. Then I suggest that next time you "look before you jump".

I did some researching, and I’m not impressed *at all*

Lets compare the Northwood/845 numbers with Willamette /845 results.

I only found P4 1.8 Ghz Sandra results (from www.hothardware.com):
I multiplied them by 1.25 to make up for the clockdifference (1.8 vs 2.26), and placed those in the second column (except for memory scores of course).

The third column contains the Northwood ES scores, and the last one the % gain from Northwood ES over Willamette:

CPU Wil 1.8 Northwood
ALU 3369 -> 4229 vs 4379 -> +3,5%
FPU/SSE2 2198 -> 2747 vs 2687 -> -2.2 %

Multimedia Wil 1.8 Northwood
Integer SSE2 7114 -> 8892 vs 8962 -> +0.8%
FP SSE2 8809 -> 11011 vs 10937 ->- 0.6%

Memory
Int ALU/RAM 634 MB/s vs 637
Float ALU 635 MB/s vs 633

A few remarks:
1) I assumed 100% scalability with clock frequency when applying the 1.25. That’s of course over optimistic .
2) On the other hand, I ignored the overclocked FSB advantage of the Nortwood ES

My conclusions:
1) Sandra is just Sandra. Lets not pay too much attention to this benchmark
2) Engineering examples are just that BUT
3) Im amazed little how the 512 Kb cache helps in improving 845 scores. I would think it would help blur the difference between 845 and 850 at least somewhat. But I see *decreased* performance clock for clock.

Sources:
http://www.hothardware.com/hh_file [...] 45s(3).htm


---- Owner of the only Dell computer with an AMD chip

Maybe? Look at all the debates going on already.

<font color=green>I post so you don't have to!
9/11 - RIP</font color=green>

> 3) Im amazed little how the 512 Kb cache helps in improving 845 scores. I would think it would help blur the difference between 845 and 850 at least somewhat. But I see *decreased* performance clock for clock.

I think you are wrong dude, lets wait for the objective benchmarks of true hardware reviewers!!!


"<b>AMD/VIA!</b>...you are <i>still</i> the weakest link, good bye!"<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by AmdMeltdown on 10/18/01 05:38 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

I think that Northwood with a DECENT chipset will prove competitive to Athlon XP. But I stress DECENT, so an i850 or that SiS 645 with 333DDR. But to hook it into a i845 with SDR RAM is nothing short of a crime. The P4 potential and is not a bad processor but I almost get the feeling that Intel don't want to succeed any more, pushing Mckiney further back, refusing to support anything more than PC1600, pushing Northwood into Janurary. I don't pretend to understand their strategy but it seems that they have shot themselves in the foot at every oppourtunity.

Charlie

Democracy Bernad, it must be stopped!

>I think you are wrong dude, lets wait for the objective
>benchmarks of true hardware reviewers!!!

I am not wrong. Im just commenting on benchmarks Raystonn linked us to. Im just saying they are far from impressive, if they are correct, and remain identical between engineering sample and final version.

---- Owner of the only Dell computer with an AMD chip