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Tuesday, November 02, 2004

Bill Speaks: Let Not Your P4 Heart Be Troubled....
The sky is falling, the sky is falling!!

Hey! Calm down, Chicken Little. It can't. Like so many other things in the world, you're a victim of panic and unsubstantiated data. Like all this -stuff- about the Pentium 4.

If it's any consolation, you should sincerely suspect that the 3.8GHz P4 is really a 4GHZ dropout. (Manufacturing tolerances support about a 10% failure rate universally.) Possibly the entire run of 4GHz CPUs... Starting to feel better now? Keep in mind that these are HT processores and Hyper Threading actually works. No, you don't get 2x the performance but the difference is measurable. So, already, an X Ghz Pentium 4 HT CPU is working like an X*1.3 GHz (or there abouts) non-HT CPU. As I've already said, more cache and smaller die sizes will increase that edge even more. No current AMD CPU will render video faster than the 3.2GHz P4 HT system I have. Short of the 4000+ and the FX-55, I've tried them. (AMD, apparently, has enough online "reviewers" and can't spare either.)

And then there's the matter of power comsumption. As speed increases, so does power consumption and, as a result, heat. If Intel kept up at this pace, it'd be a short time before we'd be back to computer rooms with faux floors to hide the cooling apparatus. (Heck, some overclockers are already using external liquid coolers... Totally crazy!)

The bottom line here is that Intel came to a fork in the road and realized it. In the silly world I live, that's good news, not cause for alarm.

# Permalink Posted at 6:32 AM 11 comments Email this Link

Comments on this Item:

Water-cooling is the way to go - I really like my two Koolance cases, and they're soooo quiet compared to my air-cooled boxes.

What's scary about the P4 situation is that there is no immediate "next-gen" replacement in the roadmap. With all of the R&D money Intel spends you'd think they could pull something out of their hat a little quicker than AMD is. Where's the P5 to save the P4 from (AMD)forced early retirement?

Here is the Techreport comparison of the latest and greatest by both companies:

http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/pentium4-xe-3.46/index.x?pg=1

If there is more light to be shed on the above, Bill, please do.

Where Intel is pulling ahead of AMD is in code optimization for media applications, but apparently the P4 3.46EE's are using the older cores and don't have the latest SSE extentions.

WRM

# posted by Anonymous 7:37 AM

Maybe I missed something, but isn't this only a "problem" if you had your heart set on a P4 with a specific clock speed?

The 3.4 in my Inspiron XPS is working just ducky, thanks, and will continue to do so barring unforeseen circumstances until I'm ready to upgrade again sometime in 2006. Hey, isn't that when the dual core CPUs are supposed to be ready? :-)

# posted by Anonymous 8:24 AM

What a bunch of pretty charts! I did things like that 10 - 12 years ago. Not bad. But the methodology sucks. You can't use underclocked CPUs. How many of the apps (or tests) were HT compliant?

Game testing is wack. It's unreal. The average human being can cope with about 51 frames per second. In a game's demo mode, the average current graphics card can spit out 200+ fps. So what? It's like the old Word "find and replace" tests that were used. They were quick! Unfortunately, they were quicker than anyone could do them manually so what did it matter.

We need to move away from games. Like drag racing, eventually you'll need to make a left turn. At that point you find out if your vehicle is just a big honkin' engine on rails or a combination of well working components.

# posted by Bill 9:16 AM

Man - back in the 1980's/early 1990's we mainframe folk moved away from water-cooling and we were glad! It's funny to see it coming back again.

# posted by Tim 6:59 PM

AMD is handily beating Intel right now in most measures of performance. The P4 is very good at a few specialized things like video encoding, but for almost everything else, the K8 architecture wins.

# posted by David 12:02 AM

I don't think you can really support that conclusion with available test data. If you can, bring it up. I'd like to take a look.

# posted by Bill 3:44 AM

Take this fairly recent article on Anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2261&p=16

It shows that AMD's latest chips beat the Intel's latest P4's in office apps, video and photo editing, gaming, 3D rendering, and professional apps. Intel only won multitasking content creation and audio and video encoding. That's 5/7 areas where AMD won. However I do concede to you that for your purpose of encoding video, Intel is faster. I just don't think it's right to imply that it's faster in general, especially since I think and am supported by evidence to the contrary.

# posted by David 9:55 AM

Did you miss the last paragraph...?

"So in the end, who takes the crown? AMD or Intel? The 3800+ took four category wins, while the Pentium 4 560 only took two, however with the exception of the gaming and professional apps category, AMD's victories were not overwhelming - especially once you take into account the fact that the 3800+ is priced much higher than the Pentium 4 560. Now that you can purchase at least a couple of 915 based motherboards for less than $130 the total cost of ownership for the Intel platform doesn't eat into the CPU price advantage. For the most part we'd say the 3800+ is faster than the Pentium 4 560 but not always worth the added cost. It's unusual but in many cases, the Pentium 4 560 is actually the bargain high-end chip of the two."

Reverse the names and you're witnessing the exact position AMD was in about three years ago and, at that time, folk were still saying that AMD ruled...

# posted by Bill 6:46 PM

Nope, didn't miss anything. We're talking about performance here, not price. In any case, read carefully:

The 3800+ took ****four**** category wins, while the Pentium 4 560 only took ****two****, however with the exception of the gaming and professional apps category, AMD's victories were not overwhelming...

From a pure performance standpoint, AMD has the lead. You should do your research and buy a CPU based on what you do more often. I don't see how you can deny that AMD won those benchmarks overall. I *certainly* wouldn't say that Intel did.

# posted by David 8:25 PM

Unfortunately for Intel, practically no applications take advantage of multi-threading on their own, which means that the Intel CPU's with HT only gain an advantage in multitasking tests.
Have a look at this over at ExtremeTech. The story is about the new 3.46Ghz Extreme Edition with a higher (1066MHz) frontside bus, but it also measures the 3.4EE and the 3.6 EE against the Athlon FX-55.
Considering that the Extreme Edition Pentium 4 is meant to be the flagship fastest processor in Intel's range (indicated by its $999 price point in bulk). It fairs very badly against the AMD chip, pay particular attention to the WMV encoding test where the new FX-55 has the edge over all the P4's tested.

-Perros-

# posted by Perros 12:26 PM

sorry, 3.6 isnt an Extreme Edition. Wheres the edit button when you need one?

-Perros-

# posted by Perros 12:27 PM

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