Memory performance
As always, we start with memory performance, because these benchmarks are synthetic, a little bit different, and not always indicative of real-world performance. They are, however, interesting, and present the opportunity to make all sorts of colorful graphs.

Both of the Pentium 4 3.4GHz processors have essentially the same amount of memory bandwidth available, as the Sandra results show, but the less aggressive cachemem algorithm allows Prescott to show off its improved data prefetching into its larger L2 cache.

Linpack shows the dramatic difference between these two Pentium 4s. Northwood offers much higher peak floating-point performance when working inside its 512K L2 cache, but Prescott's larger cache and better prefetch gives it higher throughput with larger data matrices.

Prescott shows higher memory access latencies than Northwood, probably in part because Prescott has higher access latencies in its larger L1 data cache. Let's look at the whole picture..