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Intel's New Weapon: Pentium 4 Prescott

12:03 PM - February 1, 2004 by Patrick Schmid

1. Monkey Business Or Trend Setting In Progress? Intel's Prescott Processor...
2. Processor Timeline: From Athlon 1000 To Prescott
3. Intel Pentium 4 Aka Prescott In Detail
4. More Cache: 1 MB L2 And 16 kB L1/Data
5. NetBurst Architecture: Now 31 Pipeline Stages
6. Production Yield Per Wafer & Pricing
7. Chipsets: Multiple Choice
8. The New Flagship: Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4 GHz
9. The THG CPU Guide: Check Out All Processors
10. Test Setup
11. Benchmark Results
12. SPECviewperf 7.1.1, Continued
13. DirectX 8
14. DirectX 9
15. Video Benchmarks

16. Windows Media Encoder 9
17. Audio Benchmarks
18. Application Benchmarks
19. Newtek Lightwave 7.5c
20. Synthetic Benchmarks
21. SiSoft Sandra 2004 Pro
22. Hyper Threading Analysis: Northwood Vs. Prescott
23. SPECviewperf 7.1.1, Continued
24. DirectX 8
25. DirectX 9
26. Video Benchmarks
27. Audio Benchmarks
28. Application Benchmarks
29. Newtek Lightwave 7.5c
30. Synthetic Benchmarks
31. Conclusion: Prescott Has Become A Minor Matter

February 2, the moment of truth has come: Intel is launching three new desktop processors. Pentium 4 at 3.4 GHz, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition at 3.4 GHz and the highly anticipated Prescott processor that has fueled rumors for months. The big surprise is that Prescott is not positioned to be the flagship product, but a mainstream processor. The 3.4 GHz version is thus not available yet.

When the name Prescott was first heard, people started to assume Pentium 5 was coming, as there are a number of changes differentiate Prescott from the Northwood core: 90 Nm process, 1 MB L2 cache rather than 512 kB, the L1 data cache that was doubled to 16 kB, 13 new instructions referred to as SSE3 and the new pipeline that was extended from 20 to 31 stages, officially part of Intel's NetBurst architecture. The concept sounds familiar, but has its downsides. More on that later.

Deciding against designating Prescott as the next Pentium generation may be because substantial architectural changes are within store in the near future that will be more becoming of a Pentium 5 handle. After CeBIT, socket 478 will be replaced by socket 775 as well as new chipsets that support DDR II memory and PCI Express. In addition, Intel CEO Paul Otinelli recently initiated a new discussion about possible 64 bit extensions for future Intel desktop processors.