hmm, bit of a toss-up. There's something inside me that dislikes relying on software optimisations too much (even tho processors and the software for them have to change as time goes on), and from a pure hardware standpoint (and it might just be my "hardware-centric-isms" here), I'd have to say I'd be much more comfortable with buying an Athlon 64 if I had to slap out the cash right now. It just comes across to me as more consistent overall, and less reliant on the 'whims' of (un)optimised software.

I suppose a heavy reliance on encoding/video (and rendering) in your work with some of the apps tested would be a good reason to go Intel but I'd feel dirty doing it. Also, we don't really know how optimisations with Athlon 64 will go, since the product is relatively new compared to the years the p4 line has been coded for, yet it still puts on a very competitive showing despite all of these 'limitations'. This makes me think it will kick major arse once optimised for.

What I found amusing was seeing lots of Non-HyperThreading enabled showings score higher than HyperThreading. Sphinx speech recognition benchmarks also show that the Intel compiler benefits Athlon 64 more than it does its own processors. Hmmm :)

Yes, I think the hardware-centric-isms are gonna decide for an Athlon.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the speed of a processor is determined by multiplying its basic speed by the depth of its pipeline.

Intel likes to create processors with ridiculously long pipelines so that they can offer chips running at insane speeds - never mind the fact that the pipeline hardly ever gets filled.

This is why Mac users used to talk about the 'megahertz myth': their processor had a ~10 stage pipeline so it 'ran' at much lower speeds. Similarly, the AMD processors run at a much lower speed since they also have a shorter pipeline, yet they have comparable performance.

It is pretty amazing that the prescott is roughly as fast as the northwood, seeing how it is actually running much slower. Although the chip may be able to fill its pipeline some of the time, it surely must be getting a massive amount of misses.

On the other hand, from the impressive list of changes (the huge cache being just one of them), it is clear that they didn't get there cheaply. The prescott has the potential to be a very fast chip...

As an aside, the cynic in me wonders why they picked 31 as the length for their pipeline - could it be that this is the number which makes the prescott match the northwood's performance?

More news:

The second major point we wanted to bring up is that it looks like Prescott shipments are slightly lower than expected, and even delayed a few weeks. Nearly all the vendors don't expect to see initial Prescott shipments until the 15th, and mass quantities until the 1st of March. The 3.4GHz P4EE won't show up in initial quantities until March 1st, and 3.4GHz Prescott doesn't look like it will even show up in the next 60 days...

http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.html?i=1958

I'd like to see the scaling graphs for the Prescott and the Hammer and see which one's got better curve...

I take back my previous nay sayings. Intels chips are now the cheapest processors out. I never thought I would EVER say that. So right now with slightly better preformance than the 3400+ on tests its without a doubt the best priced processor out. Sorry amd!

This is #104 again - just so people don't misunderstand, I know branch mispredict penalties are a function of pipeline length - the 400-500 cycle number I am quoting is a forced access to memory when you consider a L1 miss (4 cycles) and then an L2 miss (additional 28 cycles).

#103 - That's the most damaging thing about Intel's situation. Since they have such a high clock speed, not only do they have to deal with scability problems that arise and the stalls that are incurred on cache miss or branch mispredict, (those get FRIGGING huge at high clock speeds - we're talking 400-500 cycles as we approach 5 ghz), those 200 mhz increases aren't going to do them any good for the reasons you've already stated.

I want to see what an FX-51 at 2.3ghz or whatever it can manage vs P4EE at 3.6 and Prescott at 3.9. I think the results will begin to highlight where Prescott is going. It OC's like crazy, and I think its performance starts to get really good when you do it. I'm not sure but that's my thinking.

$.02

i'm sure prescott will show it's strength when it clocks higher just like the p4 did. when it was released it was a dog, but it found it's legs.

the only question is how well it will ramp up, if they can handle the heat issue and whether AMD, already using SOI will be able to outrun them, they have a real opportunity here . . .

Intel: Introducing our newest processor the P4 E. You can downgrade today!

I'm surprised there hasn't been more Intel bashing in response to this topic as I thought there would be. Just as well, we as consumers should be happy when AMD and Intel release new processors since the competition between the two companies is doing us a lot of good regardless of whose processor you prefer. For those of you who would like to see one company or the other die off, just remember this.

Ok, the new chip seems a bit of a dud at the speeds it was launched...but saying that Athlon XPs are generally faster than P4s in most commonly used software around the world is a bit off...
For the past 4 years I have always owned two PCs, one of each variety and more or less of similar speed ratings. I do a lot of different stuff, from compiling big projects to gaming, video encoding, web app serving etc. They both have their plus and minuses but I can't really say i have seen noticeable speed differences between the two platforms (but i would take an intel chipset from all the others any day). However, i still haven't got a hold of an A64, maybe it's about time...too bad i am a bit short in cash :(

I would expect that a lot of compilers were optimized for the deficiencies in the non-prescott core, and those are the programs being tested now. I would be willing to say that if these products were re-compiled for the Prescott you would see larger gains (i.e. the shifter unit). However the AMD 64 still seems to own some pretty important tests. (And we have yet to see 64-bit performace!)

-LS

"All other things being equal, I'd pick the Athlon 64 any day of the week—unless I were into video editing, media encoding, image processing, Lightwave rendering... "

That's great, we have Tom's Hardware which can't see anything but Intel, now let's go to the opposite direction with Techreport. Given the benchmarks, I'd say:

"All other things being equal, I'd pick the Athlon 64 any day of the week—unless I were into everything but games".

I can't really understand why people here, and almost everywhere in the world, is for a processor like if it was a football team. For an AMD supporter is almost impossible to realise:

a) A Pentium 4 3 GHz is less powerful than an Athlon 64 3000 in games
b) The same Pentium 4 3 GHz is almost always more powerful than an Athlon 64 3000 in any other kind of application
c) Every Pentium 4 3 GHz can be brought to 3,4 / 3,6 GHz only raising the FSB and the volts (1.6). Any person able to deal with the BIOS can obtain (for free) a processor which ALWAYS outperforms an Athlon 64 3000.

I'm simply reading the benchmarks, I'm really no kind of AMD-Intel supporter (I'd rather support my football team, or a tennis player, or whatever, but not an enterprise, hell!), but I can't understand why a technical article must be transformed in a football match discussion.

Just a small suggestion. For the graphs, has there ever been any thought to color coding the graphs?

If the bars do not occur in the same order on every graph (because you are ranking by performance, or whatever) it would be nice to make the bars of the products being reviewed in a different color or pattern so they stand out and are easier to find. Even highlighted the name of the product on the axis would be helpful.

I thought HT was supposed to help when running multiple applications concurrently. All the benches are using single apps. Can Tech Report find a benchmark that runs multiple apps at the same time and compare the CPUs using that? I'm curious...

Tech Report rocks as always.

Well anandadnawahatevertheheckitsnameis ran the prescott at 3.7 gig air cooled normal voltage and all without a hitch and expect you can get beyond 4 ghz rather easy... so it seems it is a faster chip if you overclock.

Also interesting bit the faster its clocked the BETTER the prescott works compared to a northwood at the same clock speed..

What that means is if you could get a 4 ghz northwood and a 4 ghz prescott the prescott would beat it hands down.

Heck even going from 2.8 to 3.2 was a marked difference.

(This was meant for Anand X in thread #74.)

Thanks for the info...I admit the only site I checked was newegg. I'll keep my eyes peeled...:)

I have yet to find anyone make a plausible statement that represents a heavy multitasking workload. I'm sorry, but having multiple windows open doesn't count because usually only the active window is consuming CPU cycles! Switching between multiple windows would be a function of whether or not the process was in memory or cached on disk, not whether or not your CPU has HT capability!!

#1) Running Anti-Virus scan doesn't count. Anyone actually try this and also attempt to get anything work related done? I'll tell you why - it's impossible. This is coming from someone who owns BOTH a dual processor opteron system and a 3.4 ghz pentium4 with "HT technology". The reason? Your hard drive gets bogged down so much so from the scan that the other thread is stalled when you attempt to do anything I/O related. Same thing that happens with single processor machines.

#2) Memory, memory, memory has more to do with how fast an operating system 'responds'. This is more of a factor IMO than dual processors or HT. Think about it from another angle - when was the last time, using a preemptive multitasking operating system, did you have an occurance where you were running SETI/Folding@home/Prime95 in the background and you noticed it impacted your performance in the application you were working on significantly? It DOESN'T. That's why it's called "preemptive multitasking". You don't need to wait for a process to voluntarily give up a task before it starts to work. It just WORKS.

#3) The ONLY plausible scenario that I can think of for dual processing/hyperthreading would be a SINGLE process with multiple threads that do work to make the task at hand go faster. This is what dual processing and hyperthreading were meant for!!!

I'm surprised they didn't call it pentium 5 either, after all - remember the first pentium 4's were slower than the pentium III's they were supposedly replacing.

What I'm looking forward to is getting to a point where we have "heavily optimized" A64, 64-bit code we can test against "heavily optimized" P4, 32-bit code. At that time I think we'll have apples to apples. Most, if not all, of the performance evaluations the A64 "loses" currently it loses to applications which have been heavily optimized for the P4 over the last few years.

That performance differences are software related in these cases is spelled out by looking at Ace's Hardware findings for media encoding using Windows Media Encoding here:

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000319

...in which 3.2 GHz Prescott performance is behind not only the A64 3400 & 3200, but also is behind the P4C 3.2. So clearly, the idea that "Prescott is faster for media encoding," is simply untrue. Prescott's speed in media encoding relative to other cpus will depend on the specific media-encoding software being used for media encoding when all of the cpus are tested. I suspect that when we compare software equally optimized for both A64 and P4, A64 will win probably every time. Really, saying that one cpu is inherently faster than another for certain tasks, without looking at the specific pieces of software used for the test, indeed the specific tests themselves run within that software, cannot possibly be accurate, IMO.

Here is what Ace's says about Prescott's loss in the Ace's "media encoding" tests:

"We have to do more encoding tests to be absolutely sure, but we were quite surprised to see the Pentium 4 family beaten in WME 9.0, which is well optimized for SSE-2. However, WME 9 also uses the SSE-2 capabilities of the Athlon 64 much better. Prescott takes 11% more time to complete the encoding than the previous 3.2 GHz Pentium 4. According to some early reports we heard that SSE-3 instructions can improve encoding performance by 5-7% at most, but even that will not make Prescott shine."

What baffles me is how terrible the Prescott results were in ScienceMark. I was honestly expecting a better show given the improved latency of some of the instructions, and the fact that the code is not very branch dependent. In reality the bottleneck is memory latency and bandwidth, both 2 issues that really are taken care of by a larger cache (increasing cache hit ratio) and the strength of the 800 fsb platform. Additional bottlenecks are multiplication/addition (FP - MolDyn) and some transcendentals (a fast power function is a must for Primordia).

I'm going to have to do some more research and see if there's any bottleneck I can code around.

No overclocking test!?

#58 Sorry, but talking about "video editing, media encoding, image processing, Lightwave rendering... ", given that a Pentium 4 is also faster in Office applications, leaves out only games for Athlon 64...

Queen put out a song that fits this situation.

The A64 also runs FPU/X87 math faster, and for those of us who participate in Grid.org's cancer and / or smallpox research projects, X87 horsepower is all we need. I swear by my OC'ed Barton 2500+ (@ 2.25GHz) for cancer research.

Also, I've been grilling them for a bit about running a PiFast benchmark, ala the boys at Hexus.net. That tests your FPU, memory bandwidth, and cache size/speed effectiveness.

Heck, for that matter I know they've bantered about a F@H bench, but never got it off the ground. F@H can be forced to run SSE or SSE2 extensions (not sure on the latter, actually) and pitting two classes (three with the EE) against the two classes of A64 would be a rather nice shooting match.

There is a LOT more than games that an AMD64 is good at. Perhaps file compression? Compiling?

Just because Damage hasn't covered it here, doesn't mean it hasn't been done. Obviously your fingers aren't broken if you're posting here, so go Google some more A64/P4 comparos and see what other reviewers have to say.

[EDIT] - just thought I'd add that it's curious that the P4s don't appear to have the best memory bandwidth in SiSoft Sandra, but do in Cachemem. Yet, they fall behind pretty good when it comes to the A64's single-channel, on-die memory controller coupled with HT and low-latency RAM. 48 ns for memory access is really quick in ANYONE's books.

What's even more "fishy" is the fact that the Prescotts, for all their doubled L2 caches and "superior" strained silicon design... they get absolutely murdered at Sciencemark's tests by their Northwood brethren. Last I checked Sciencemark depended on whatever instruction sets you ran (SSE2 included, and HT-aware as well), and *gasp* memory bandwidth. For the Prescotts to get absolutely flogged by their own stablemates, nevermind AMD... that's embarassing.

At least the P4 3.4EE manages to edge out the FX-51 in Molecular Dynamics, but still gets its clock cleaned by the 2.2GHz A64. Once again, in Primordia, which leans more favourably on memory bandwidth, the P4 3.4GHz EE manages to edge out one, but not two, of the 2.2GHz AMD64 offerings. If nothing else, Primordia confirms what SiSoft Sandra says about the memory bandwidth of the FX-51: it's there in droves. A chuckle goes to the P4 2.8GHz Prescott for finishing dead last in the M.D. bench.

Finally, when comparing the benches for MD and Primordia, you'll see that the tests are indeed HT-aware, as the non-HT scores are considerably higher for the P4s of both (three?) varieties.

Do I draft? No. Do I design funny cartoons? No. Then I guess I have no need for a P4, either Prescott, Northwood (which appears to be the better of the two), or the Xeon-cloaked-as-an-EE.

Sure, you can argue that the FX-51 is really an Opteron 148, but then, why does the A64 3400+ manage to edge it out still in a few benches? Because it doesn't matter, AMD still has the bang for the buck, and the A64 single-channel line proves it.

bozzunter, i think damage is fair,

he is just saying that intel is better for video editing and encoding and that amd is better for games.

so what is your problem. Damage did not take sides, if he likes to play games than he should take a amd cpu. If he wanted a video station that is very stable, he would have said that he would prefer an intel chip.

Where is the big deal??

Cem

Completely off topic but.. http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/7849191.htm

Can anyone else smell the irony? Using macs bwahahaa.

Gee. Again they release an underperforming processor, which relies on very specific conditions to do the actual processor speed any justice at all. The P4 has really become the bloatware of the processor industry in my book. They can do much better, as they have showed with the Centrino.

The P4 is kind of like a fast train. It can go fast, but you still need a damn railway to do it.

Excellent review, if only I had the money to buy bleeding edge stuff and the time to play with it!!