Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz Prescott
And Pentium 4 3.4GHz "Northwood"

By, Dave Altavilla
March 22, 2004

We fired up Sandra as a quick sanity check on synthetic performance metrics.  We ran three of the built-in sub-system tests that comprise the SANDRA 2004 suite (CPU, Multimedia and Memory). All of these tests were run with our Prescott and Northwood Pentium 4 CPUs at default clock speeds of 3.4GHz

SiSoftware SANDRA
Synthetic CPU and Memory Benchmarks
P4 Prescott 3.4GHz
CPU TEST
P4 Prescott 3.4GHz
MULTIMEDIA TEST
P4 Prescott 3.4GHz
MEMORY TEST
P4 Northwood 3.4GHz
CPU TEST
P4 Northwood 3.4GHz
MULTIMEDIA TEST
P4 Northwood 3.4GHz
MEMORY TEST

As far as Sandra's basic Integer and Floating Point performance tests go, in their "CPU" and "Multimedia" modules, Prescott is simply a small step behind the Northwood Pentium 4, clock for clock.  As expected however, Prescott leads the way slightly in the Memory test, due mainly to its larger on 1MB of on chip cache.  Unfortunately for Prescott, Sandra's code fits fairly efficiently in Northwood's 512K of on chip cache, so the only saving graces for Prescott are its more accurate branch prediction unit and improved Hyperthreading, both of which aren't quite enough to make up for its deeper 31 stage pipeline, which on a branch miss adds significantly to its overall latency. 

From a different perspective, however, we were actually impressed at how well Prescott performs versus an equivalently clocked Northwood, given the fact that its pipeline is so much deeper.  Intel has made great strides to compensate for the penalties of a branch miss with its 31 stage Prescott core versus Northwood's 20 stage design.  Now all they have to do is ramp clock speeds in order to take advantage of it.  As with many things in life and in silicon, it's always easier said than done.

FutureMark PCMark 2004
Synthetic CPU and Memory Benchmarks

Again, on a purely synthetic performance scale, we have put together some scores with FutureMark's PCMark04 benchmark.  We ran two of the modules in their test suite, the CPU and Memory tests.  First up is the CPU test and here's what FutureMark says this test performs.

"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. There are nine tests in all. Two pairs of tests are run multithreaded each test in the pair is run in its own thread. The remaining five tests are run single threaded. These tests include such functions as file encryption, decryption, compression and decompression, grammar check, audio conversion, WMV and DivX video compression."

The Pentium 4 team sweeps cleanly here, with our 3.4GHz Prescott CPU holding its own fairly well, just a small percentage point behind the 3.4GHz Northwood core.  Interestingly enough, the 3.4GHz Extreme Edition P4 drops in slightly behind the Northwood core but by a completely insignificant margin.
 

Details on PCMark04's Memory Test are as follows:

"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 or L3 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing."

Clearly the Athlon 64 FX's integrated memory controller is giving the FX-51 and FX-53 processors an edge in this test.  However, the Athlon 64 3400+ can't compete with even the 3.2GHz Northwood P4.  In terms of memory bandwidth, the new 3.4GHz Prescott based P4 delivers a potent offering, coming within striking distance of even the high priced Athlon 64 FX-51 and FX-53 processors.

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