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Reviews Around The Web
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Thursday, February 24, 2005
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Overall, the additional features found on these new processors are definitely welcomed, albeit they are nothing new and have been around for a very long time on the AMD Athlon 64 processors. The move by the new lineup of Intel P4 600 series processors is definitely to catch up with its competitors offering and in a bid to outdo them, they come with a massive 2MB of on-die level 2 cache. While this huge cache is suitable for high performance workloads (suitable for even workstation class scenarios), for enthusiasts, it seems that the extra caches has limited benefits.
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Monday, February 21, 2005
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When it comes to the newest Extreme Edition processor the 3.73GHz EE I'm almost at a loss for words. The move from a 130nm to a 90nm core means that the Prescott has finally arrived, but it brought with it the famed longer pipelines and the performance levels over the 3.46GHz EE are minimal. The 3.73GHz EE also lacks Speedstep and the C1E halt state unlike the 6XX series which all have these features. After looking at the benchmark data again I'd almost rather have the less expensive Intel P4 660 with all the bells and whistles over the Extreme Edition processors that cost more and offer less in some cases.
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And it's that 64-bit ability of Prescott-2M that's its main selling point, rather than any performance to be gained by the double-sized L2 cache, compared to Prescott-1M. I missed out gaming performance since I honestly couldn't find a game that really enjoyed the 2MiB that the 6-series or 3.73GHz XE had. While I could show gaming scaling with the XE, that was due to bus speed increases and the 3.46GHz Gallatin-2M was often faster. The working set of most games simply doesn't care for much more than 1MiB or so of on-CPU memory.
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