Intel's New Pentium 4 Processor
Overclocking
Many of the overclockers of this world were afraid that Pentium 4's quad-pumped 100 MHz bus would make bus overclocking of this processor as difficult and restrictive as with Athlon and its dual-pumped 133/100 MHz-bus. I can bring you the surprisingly positive news that Pentium 4 is as overclockable as Intel processors always have been. You can imagine that the multiplier of official Pentium 4 processors will be locked, but with a good P4-motherboard you won't have any problems overclocking the bus.
I took advantage of the jumperless-mode of the Asus P4T-motherboard and managed to let two different Pentium 4 processors run at up to 125 MHz bus clock. I even included a 1.4 GHz Pentium 4 overclocked to 14 x 115 MHz = 1610 MHz as well as the evaluation 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 overclocked to 16 x 108 MHz = 1728 MHz in the benchmark results. I only had to raise the voltage from 1.7 to 1.8 V. There was no thermal issue, as Pentium 4 heat sinks are already designed for much higher heat dissipation than what current Pentium 4 processors are actually able to produce.
Benchmark Considerations
Due to time constraints we were only able to do run full benchmark suite under Windows 98, but I also added the Linux Kernel Compilation. We have already done a major part of the Windows 2000 benchmarks and will supply them shortly. Intel supplied a lot of special benchmarking software for Pentium 4, which we will evaluate, run and publish in the next few days.
After what we have learned in the architectural part of this article, we should expect Pentium 4 to show excellent performance in all benchmarks that are heavily integer based and the ones that take great advantage of the new high-speed bus between processor, system and memory. SSE2-optimized software should obviously run very fast on Pentium 4 as well. Although Intel claims that Pentium 4 has the worlds best floating point performance we know that in reality the normal FPU of Pentium 4 is hardly even able to live up to Pentium III standards. Only floating point applications that use SSE2 could possibly support Intel's bold claim. Today's standard software is obviously not yet SSE2-optimized, so that standard FPU-intensive software will probably run rather slow on Pentium 4 systems.
Benchmark Setup
To enable Pentium 4's SSE2 we installed DirectX 8 on all the test platforms. We were using our standard NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS graphics card, but had to find out that the latest available and DX8-enabled driver rev. 7.17 is performing very poorly in 3D as well as 2D applications on all of the test systems. Therefore we decided to use the reliable 6.31 driver.
Hardware Setup | |
---|---|
I850 Socket423 Pentium 4 Platform | ASUS P4T, BIOS |
Rambus Memory | 2 128 MB Samsung PC800 RDRAM RIMMS |
SDRAM Socket A platform for AMD Athlon and Duron Processors | ASUS A7V, BIOS 1004D final |
SDRAM Socket 370 platform for Intel Pentium III and Celeron processors | ASUS CUSL2, BIOS 1004.003 |
SDRAM Memory | 128 MB Wichmann Workx PC133 SDRAM CL2, setting 2-2-2-5/7 |
DDR Socket A platform for AMD Athlon processors at 133 MHz Front Side Bus | Gigabyte GA-7DX Rev.1.3, BIOS Rev. |
DDR Memory | 256 MB Micron CL2 |
Hard Drive for Windows 98 Tests | IBM DTLA-307030 ATA100 IDE, 30 GB, FAT32 |
Hard Drive for Linux Test | Seagate ST320430A ATA66 IDE, 19 GB, ext2 |
Graphics card for Sysmark2000, Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tornament and 3D Studio Max 2 | NVIDIA Geforce 2 GTS Reference CardCore Clock 200 MHzMemory Clock 333 MHzDriver 6.34 |
Graphics Card for SPECviewperf | NVIDIA Quadro2 Reference CardCore Clock 230 MHzMemory Clock 400 MHzDriver 6.31 |
Software Setup | |
Windows Version | Windows98SE, 4.10.2222A |
Windows Resolution for Sysmark2000 | 1024x768x16x85 |
Windows Resolution for SPECviewperf | 1280x1024x32x85 |
Linux Version | SuSE Linux 6.4, Kernel 2.2.14, THG benchmarking kernel, gcc 2.95.2 |
Quake 3 Arena | Retail VersionSetting Normal, 640x480x16 bit color, no sound |
DirectX Version | 8.0 |
Unreal Tournament | Version 4.28 (patched)Setting 640x480x16, no sound |
SPECviewperf | Rev. 6.1.2 |
Memtime | Intel Memory Transfer Timing Utility |
MPEG4 Encoding Software | FlasK MPEG, ver. 0.594DivX ;-) 3.11alpha |
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ta152h utahraptorI just don't see this Rambus lasting that long. I think the future lies in DDR.Reply
I think the Pentium 4 will not last past 2006.