Thursday, February 19, 2004

Prescott This....
Notice, if you will, the distinct lack of fanfare with which Intel's next iteration Pentium 4, codenamed Prescott, arrived. Why, you ask? Well, 3.2GHz and 3.4GHz versions of the 90nm CPU, according to Intel, may perform the same as the larger (130nm) Norwood processors at similar clock speeds. Huh? Hey, would I lie? (No, I wouldn't. It's actually slower in some cases compared to the older Norwood version.) Of course, that flies in the face of everything we know about CPUs when you double the internal L2 cache, as has been done with the Prescott, and shorten the internal data pathways, ditto. What gives? Intel was a little roundabout on the reason, relying on that old fallback, "Well, the current software doesn't make use of the extra SSE instructions, yada-yada-yada."

Some say its because of the Prescott's longer pipeline. Some say Intel put a toll booth on the data plaza. Whatever, Prescott shrank (in size) and grew (in L2 cache) so Intel could make versions faster later on, hitting that (currently) magic 4GHz mark. It's really no big deal except there are bound to be some unscrupulous hardware vendors hiding Norwoods under the giant processor fans in their PCs for sale when you should be getting Prescotts. (They're priced the same and, well, you have to get rid of old inventory somehow, don't you?) Eyes open, folks.
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