Intel's New Weapon: Pentium 4 Prescott

Processor Timeline: From Athlon 1000 To Prescott

Let's take a look at what happened over the last three years before we deal with the pros and cons of Intel's new silicon.

It's striking to see that clock speeds have not distinctly climbed over the last 18 months. Both AMD and Intel had to find other ways to enhance performance of their products without necessarily cranking up clock speeds. AMD raised the system clock from 166 to 200 MHz and doubled the L2 cache, while Intel introduced HyperThreading and equally accelerated its quad-pumped system bus from 133 MHz to 200 MHz.

It is now becoming apparent that neither AMD nor Intel may be able to achieve faster processor speeds with the mature 130 nm production processes. That definitely applies to AMD's AthlonXP, while Intel seems to have more clock speed margin here. Our overclocking project showed that extreme cooling with liquid nitrogen can hoist the Northwood core to exceed 5 GHz. In addition, our 3.4 GHz Northwood sample was capable of easily running more than 4 GHz with an average copper cooler.

However, it is interesting so see Intel's Gigahertz race has not returned performance in a proportion that would equal the clock speed relation between AMD and Intel processors. Instead, AMD has managed to establish the Athlon family as a permanent intruder to Intel's global processor market - with a clock speed difference of nowadays 55% or 1.2 GHz.