Why I don't think the P4 is complete, utter tripe.

[Guden Oden]

CLICK ME
This here is a good example of why it is bad to let computer part purchasing habits to become religion.

The 2MB P4s do look really good from a performance point of view I have to say. I am sure Someone's going to note the chip runs at over 70C when loaded, but so what. Stick a bigger cooler on it... I don't care about that, I care about getting work done.

 

[Moloch]

Not all of it use 3dmax.
But I'm sure most of us game, in which case, a A64 is superior in cpu limited cases.
In other cases, you could even have a 3ghz/3000+ with 4XAA and 16AF and get a minimal gain from a 3.73 EE cpu.
in HL2 canals demo from anandtech, my AXP 2500@ 3200(ram at 333), I only get 7 less fps at 1024 4X aa and 8X AF.
You could say with a 6800GT of X800 pro, the differnce could be more, but in that case I'd be at 1600x1200 with 4X aa and 16X AF, and the differnce would be still almost nothing.
For applications, winzip lives the p4s, and winrar loves the A64.
I personally use winrar, since it pwns winzip in every way.
I do alot of extracting, so I want a A64 for my next cpu, and I use firefox, which loves the A64.
I fool around with photoshop, which prefers A64.
and of course gaming.
I don't do movie encoding anymore, so I don't care about that, and I dont use 3d modeling etc.
A better review the the 6XX series is at http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q1/pentium4-600/index.x?pg=1 btw.
Since I don't do encoding anymore, I dont care about the superior multitasking performence either.
P4's still run hot, and you need the very best air cooling overclock them. I'm obviously an AMD fan, but I'm not totally a fanboy, back in march of last year when I bought my 2500+, I would have gotten a 2.4 P4C if the pricing wasn't superior for the 2500+.
Gaming and unraring is my primary concern, and the A64 excells in that respect.

 

[Guden Oden]

Not all of it use 3dmax.

No, of course not, but the principle is similar in other programs that load the CPU.

But I'm sure most of us game, in which case, a A64 is superior in cpu limited cases.

Not always, and not really by all that much either most of the time. You really think I couldn't manage with 136FPS as opposed to 158?

I game AND do productive stuff with my box. I want a well-balanced system, you want a system that says AMD on it. That's pretty flawed reasoning.

I personally use winrar, since it pwns winzip in every way.

Hah... Never thought of archivers "pwning" one another... Well, winrar costs money. I use 7zip, which is FREE, and has the 7z compression format which supposedly is superior to both zip (not that difficult) and RAR, though I've never actually used it so I don't know if it's true. I just unpack stuff with it 99% of the time and don't really care which CPU runs it faster. On any decent system it's going to be disk limited anyway unless one unpacks from one drive to another.

I dont care about the superior multitasking performence either.

Well, at least you admit it's superior, that's always something.

The thing is, being able to run two hardware threads helps with the "smoothness" feel of the way the computer responds. As long as there is data in the caches for either of the threads, they can run, and with 2MB of it, there's a much better probability of that happening than in the original northwood P4, which had only 512KB. That's what's so appealing with the chip.

P4's still run hot

Yea, and so do the latest Athlons too if you've noticed, they're up to above 90W peak dissipation now though that is still considerably less than the almighty prescott. All chips when clocked fast are going to run hot. It's unavoidable and pretty much irrelevant as long as you're not building a Shuttle system or such. Any decent sized/quality case with proper ventilation can handle it fine. Nothing to get anal over.

I guess you were one of the Intel guys who ragged on the Athlon when it ran faster but much hotter than the P3 in the late 90s and early 00s, eh?

 

[XxStratoMasterXx]

Intel is coming back! It won't be long before Intel has the crown again. Just like nVidia has taken back the crown after a few mistakes.

I can't wait to upgrade my lowly machine to a dual core P4 with HT!

 

[cristic]

Before jumping the gun about intel fabulous P4 tech read *and* watch this:

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12413

 

[Moloch]

No, of course not, but the principle is similar in other programs that load the CPU.

In that case, with that logic, perhaps we should compare the A64 and the P4 6XX in mathematic/science applications?
Or how about cinebench 2003 shading or adobe photoshop image editing?
The principle the same

Not always, and not really by all that much either most of the time. You really think I couldn't manage with 136FPS as opposed to 158?

If your numbers are that high, perhaps you should turn the settings up.
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2330&p=2
Thats if you want fps in excess of 100, in which case, the load on the gpu is small, showing the advantages of an onboard memory controllor and short cpu pipeline, amongst aother things.

I game AND do productive stuff with my box. I want a well-balanced system, you want a system that says AMD on it. That's pretty flawed reasoning.

It could be argued that the A64 is more balanced, and the 6XX is finally catching up(with a ton more cache, none the less).
Depending on your meaning of productive, the A64 could be far superior.

Hah... Never thought of archivers "pwning" one another... Well, winrar costs money. I use 7zip, which is FREE, and has the 7z compression format which supposedly is superior to both zip (not that difficult) and RAR, though I've never actually used it so I don't know if it's true. I just unpack stuff with it 99% of the time and don't really care which CPU runs it faster. On any decent system it's going to be disk limited anyway unless one unpacks from one drive to another.

I don't compress things, I decompress things, which are 100% using winrar, so the advantage of 7-zip can't be realized for me.
I have however used it before, pretty good program, but winrar is still the standard for my uses.

Well, at least you admit it's superior, that's always something.
The thing is, being able to run two hardware threads helps with the "smoothness" feel of the way the computer responds. As long as there is data in the caches for either of the threads, they can run, and with 2MB of it, there's a much better probability of that happening than in the original northwood P4, which had only 512KB. That's what's so appealing with the chip.

My AXP 3200 is pleanty smooth for me, and the A64 is no slough when encoding wmv and using mozilla, which is my browser of choice, after reviewing opera and avant, btw avant didn't work right for me, alot of site drop down menus didnt work, but they worked in IE, which is strange since it's a shell for IE.

Yea, and so do the latest Athlons too if you've noticed, they're up to above 90W peak dissipation now though that is still considerably less than the almighty prescott. All chips when clocked fast are going to run hot. It's unavoidable and pretty much irrelevant as long as you're not building a Shuttle system or such. Any decent sized/quality case with proper ventilation can handle it fine. Nothing to get anal over.

I guess you were one of the Intel guys who ragged on the Athlon when it ran faster but much hotter than the P3 in the late 90s and early 00s, eh?

I did aknowledge the 1.4 athlon was a hot SOB.
Are A64 temps in the 60C+ range yet?
90 watts?
An A64 3500+(90nm) system uses uses 155 watts total while runningCinebench's rendering test, a P4 650(3.4ghz) uses 216 watts, a difference of 61 watts, so it would appear to they're doing fine.
Even a FX55(.13nm) uses 20 watts less than a 660, so either way you slice it, intel has a comparabily power hungary trip.
While intel is clocked much higher, they're doing alot less work per cycle, so perhaps that's a moot point?

Before jumping the gun about intel fabulous P4 tech read *and* watch this:

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12413

Would love to, but the server is too busy according to WMP

 

[Humus]

Not all of it use 3dmax.

No, of course not, but the principle is similar in other programs that load the CPU.

I'm not sure that 3dsmax is particularly representative. AFAIK it's pretty heavy on SSE computations, which is a bit of a weak point on AMD cpus. Most of the time tough, 3DNow! is a good deal faster than SSE on AMD, and often faster than SSE on Intel.

 

[3dilettante]

I wonder how long AMD intends to support the 3DNow! instructions.

Perhaps the cost of keeping them isn't all that great, but it looks like the future is SSE, especially since x87 is deprecated in favor of SSE in 64 bit mode.

 

[jvd]

The new p4s are nice. But what are they going to do when amd finally moves to a new memory speed ? they have been at ddr 200 for a very long time . What happens if they jump to ddr 400 or ddr 2 533 ?

TO me these chips intel are releaseing as of late are just them running scared

 

[pcchen]

I wonder how long AMD intends to support the 3DNow! instructions.

Perhaps the cost of keeping them isn't all that great, but it looks like the future is SSE, especially since x87 is deprecated in favor of SSE in 64 bit mode.

For example, Windows XP x86-64 version does not save FP states in long mode. So you can't use x87 or anything based on x87 registers (basically MMX and 3DNow!).

 

[Guden Oden]

Umm, well, AMD supports DDR400 since a very long time do they not? That's certainly the impression I've got anyway.

Anyway, dunno how 'desperate' a company can be when they have like 80% of the market... It seems to me you're ascribing motives to Intel that doesn't exist in reality.

 

[Mariner]

You have to admit, however, Intel is still dominating the market despite the Prescott chips rather than because of them. Northwood was a very good processor but the migration to 90nm has caused Intel serious problems. What has saved their market share is the fact that the old adage of 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM' holds equally true for Intel chips. The good name Northwood garnered for P4 has carried through to the (very poor IMO) Prescott chips. As an example of this, a friend of mine sells server systems for a living (yes, he's very wealthy!). Last year I asked him if he sold any Opteron-based systems. He told me he hadn't even considered it because he (and everyone else) thought Xeons must just be better because they were Intel chips! The 32-bit Xeons at the time were hugely outperformed by their cheaper Opteron equivalents but Intel was accepted as the norm so that is what people wanted (what this says for AMDs marketing is an entirely different matter).

The ridiculous amounts of heat produced by Prescott led to the design of the BTX standard - something which virtually none of the motherboard/case vendors have any interest in. It's a redesign driven by the weaknesses of the Prescotts rather than being a particularly more efficient cooling system. One good thing to come out of the Prescott fiasco is the fact that Intel have realised they couldn't keep going on the same track and have cancelled their development of future chips based on the Netburst architecture to incorporate the excellent Pentium M core/design techniques instead.

As it stands, it is possible to have a stable (though very hot) Prescott system - just! Performance can surpass the A64 (slightly) for some uses although how much of an performance improvement the new Revision E of A64 will bring to the table is unsure yet (Revision E will contain support for SSE3 instructions and an updated memory controller).

Personally, I have no interest in Prescott as I've become interested in reducing the amount of noise a system makes. The Prescotts dissipate so much heat it is practically impossible to silence a system running one of these. Xbitlabs power consumption charts are very telling:

P4 power consumption

Athlon64 power consumption

To me, the Prescott just seems to be poor design and engineering and I can't really see why anyone would prefer one of these over the Athlon64 at present. I realise Intel has to keep producing chips based on Prescott until it has some proper Pentium M-based new designs available but just pumping up the clock speed and adding extra cache seems a rather crude way to keep up to me.

My next desktop system is going to be a 'silent' one based on either A64 or PentiumM. The system I'm currently planning will probably give me around 70% of the performance of a top-end Prescott but with about a third of the heat dissipation if using an Athlon64 or even less than a third if using Pentium M. Either an A64 or PentiumM system would also be a heck of a lot cheaper than a top-end Prescott. This system will probably also run at around half the temperature of an equivalent Prescott despite almost silent running and, as we all know, less heat is better for computer components. Oh, I'll also make a saving on my power bills but this won't be all that significant - very 'green' though!

 

[Guden Oden]

You have to admit, however, Intel is still dominating the market despite the Prescott chips rather than because of them.

There's nothing really wrong with the prescotts, unless one considers the heat a negative - I don't, really.

What has saved their market share is the fact that the old adage of 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM' holds equally true for Intel chips.

Now this is something I have to disagree with. The P4 is an extremely fast chip, intel stuff is always stable and high quality. How could any of that be wrong (except if one's complaining about the higher price tags on their stuff, or needed x86-64, which they couldn't offer until just recently)?

The ridiculous amounts of heat produced by Prescott led to the design of the BTX standard

This is mainly a myth I think. Cases were in serious need of a redesign as it is, remember, ATX specs are nearly 10 years old now. They weren't designed for today's high-powered components, hence the reason for the multitude of fans etc in an ATX case of today...

There's little activity on the BTX front now, but it'll come. Maybe you're not young enough to remember, but people bitched like crazy about ATX too when it was new.

The Prescotts dissipate so much heat it is practically impossible to silence a system running one of these.

That's simply untrue.

 

[Blitzkrieg]

Stratomaster, AFAIK the dual core P4s will not have HT.
Be interesting when dual cores come out, I think all that HT optimisation could backfire on intel. Im pretty sure the dual core athlons will kick the living shit out of the dual core p4s.

 

[Mariner]

The Prescotts dissipate so much heat it is practically impossible to silence a system running one of these.

That's simply untrue.

Note that when I say 'Silence' I mean Silence!

I'm talking about the high-end ones here - I know it's theoretically possible to undervolt a lower end Prescott so it's heat dissipation is less crazy and silencing becomes feasible. But then, it's also possible to undervolt A64 so less heat is dissipated and, indeed, even PentiumM can be undervolted with some success.

For me the huge amount of heat pumped out by Prescott is a complete deal breaker as we know computer components don't like excess heat. Intel obviously agrees with me, otherwise they couldn't have cancelled development of the Netburst architecture in favour of using Pentium M based technology!

The fact that you don't consider this excessive heat to be a problem whereas I do shows that we have fundamental differences of opinion here. I'd say the heat dissipation of any chip is of great importance in valueing it's worth.

I am in no way AMD/Intel biased and have built a number of systems using chips from both companies over the past 10 years but, to me, the Prescott/Netburst architecture is much inferior to A64 and Pentium M. Once again, I could say that Intel agrees with me as they have cancelled development of Netburst in favour of Yonah.

As for BTX, I'm not convinced of some of the design decisions, especially from a silencing point of view. Having the processor and it's cooling fan at the front of the case doesn't seem such a good idea to me. Having noise ejected from the back of the case is certainly a much better idea than the front. I do remember the introduction of the ATX and can't really recall to much complainint about it in comparison to that around BTX. Admittedly this was some years back and my memory isn't the best!

 

[Guden Oden]

Stratomaster, AFAIK the dual core P4s will not have HT.

The xeons will, so one can expect the feature to migrate down to the rest of the processor line eventually...