New Results Force New Conclusions, Continued
What bottom line is any sane person supposed to draw after those findings?
Right now there are hardly any important applications available that could show the strength of Pentium 4's new SSE2 features. As long as this isn't the case, Pentium 4 loses out against Athlon and sometimes even against Pentium 3, because Intel was obviously saving silicon by implementing only a rather weak FPU into Pentium 4. The other way out of this dilemma would be extremely high clock rates, but it will take a while until faster Pentium 4 processors will become available. Then there is the fact that it won't even take a year until the successor of the current Pentium 4 will become available, which will ensure that the upgrade path of current Pentium 4 systems ends in a dead end road, because the 'new' Pentium 4 will use a new and incompatible Socket478 .
If you now consider that Pentium 4 systems are the most expensive PCs money can buy right now, then I wonder how any customer could possibly justify the purchase of Pentium 4 within the next months.
I have to admit that I started off being a believer in Pentium 4 and I still respect Pentium 4's future potential. However, right now I am genuinely disappointed. For the time being, I wouldn't let any of my friends or family members buy a Pentium 4 system. It's simply not justifiable.
Epilogue
I am continuing to benchmark Pentium 4 with even more benchmarks on more operating systems. I want to find out if Intel was just being bold to release a new processor with sub-par performance in today's applications and call it "the fastest x86-processor in the world", or if there is indeed a bit more to it than good scores only in Quake 3 Arena and beautiful future tunes. You can be assured that I will keep you posted.
I wish a lovely Thanksgiving!
Please read the Intel's New Pentium 4 Processor article!
