Good review as always, but as for the product, color me "meh".

I can't believe enthusiasts buy P4's. Unless they are mad overclockers in which case I'm sure it's a fun challenge. What a total rip off these things really are though.

Please spare me the idea that "the mainstream market is where these things belong" nonsense. The mainstream market would be far better served by Pentium M's in their desktop. Would save them on the power bill. Hell a .09u Pentium 3 would likely be real fast, real cheap, and real low power. The only reason the mainstream market needs these P4s is bragging rights for which they don't understand anyway. Most mom and pops still run their trusty P2's. My parent's sure would if it weren't for my little bro being a gamer. A P2 can sure rip thru Office and IE.

Pentium 4 has and always will be a marketing-designed CPU. It's built around stupid consumerisms (higher clock speed is best) and now that has blown up in Intel's face. The sooner they dump the architecture the better off they'll be. (Technologically at least)

The Pentium 4 has no market segment other than Dell. Lol.

I mean, I go to Best Buy and I see like 90% Intel CPUs. And like 60% of those are P4s, the rest being Celeron-M and P-M. How on EARTH can they even consider sticking these Prescotts into notebooks? What, do they throttle ALL the time? What BS. Athlon 64 deserves much more of the notebook segment. MUCH more.

For example, I got this little eMachines 6805 notebook sitting here with a A64 3000+ and 9600 in it....for $1300 brand new after rebate (yes, got the rebates). I upped it to 1GB PC2700 aftermarket, which I can run at PC3200 using A64Tweaker. This thing lays waste to basically every P4 in stock A YEAR LATER at Best Buy. Certainly everything near its price range. It makes me nauseous to see a P4 3.0 with Intel Extreme Graphics.....man they kid consumers SO DAMN WELL!

I'd say that 80% of the notebooks there, even the ones with the high end CPUs, are running integrated graphics. Way to throw away performance, even in just Windows.

The OEMs build these damned notebooks (aka thermal radiators with squrrel cage blowers) to appease idiots. Said idiot could go on eBay and buy a $400 notebook with a Geforce 2 Go, GF4MX, Radeon 7500, Radeon 9000, etc and have a lot more fun, a lot less heat, a lot more leftover cash, probably more RAM, and the 2D would probably be BETTER!!!

end super rant. thanks.

genesisx - 20-30%? Good sir, you aren't pimping your hardware correctly! No such idle time shall be found in my home!

Dag nabit, I FOLD if I have to, but to go idle? NEVER! :D

He's talking about all the 'Joe Sixpacks' who 1) have only ever heard about Intel anyway and wouldn't want to buy the 'off-brand' AMD 2) wouldn't notice a performance difference for the reason #80 says.

Scott,
How about including folding in the benchmarking suite?

Grab a tinker and a gromacs on to a CD and run them for say 10% and report the time. Also report power draw whilst doing this. You can then do time * power and see which is the most efficient for folding (lowest number wins).

There have been a number of threads in the forums about which processor is best for folding, this would help sort it out.

I can't help but laugh when people say that Intel's design of the Netburst architecture was a stupid and foolish one. Especially when they've made more money from it than any other company in the history of the computing industry, ever. If AMD had half a brain they would have done something similar.

i remember.... way back, when the release of a new series of processors meant an increase in performance, NEW features, and reason for news.

Now we get +/- 5% performance gain....wtf ?

btw, anyone know of any enthusiasts that have OC'd a Pentium M to 3ghz+ ???

If they're continue build new prescott core then it will icreases more power and heat temperature, it's so pathetic. I going stick Intel Northwood or AMD 64 Althon. :P I don't know why prescott really want one.

I am hoping that AMD comes out with something like the Pentium M that is cheaper than the Intel version.

"Recent lottery winners will also be pleased to learn of the emergence of a new Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor. Based on the same new CPU core as the 600 series, this puppy runs at 3.73GHz on a 1066MHz front-side bus, and it has 64-bit support, as well."

Funny remark, but I'd go with Opterons with $$$$$$$$$$$ money in bank.

The fact of the matter is for most users out there unless one cpu is BOTH more then 30% faster then the other AND the slow one iss too slow to run a program well enough ... no one cares.

I can run most every game I play more then fast enough for me to enjoy and I dont have the fastest system by a huge margin.

Its this fact that makes consoles win out in the long run. While during most of thier run a console is slower then the pc no one cares. It works and was afordable thats all they cared about.

Where did you get those pics of the colorful die? I'd like hi-res versions of them.

Excellent review, as always. You got this out fast, and on a Sunday no less!

Considering the current availability of Northwood processors, I might never do a processor upgrade on this computer. I am not buying a Prescott.

Not interested.

Man, I was expecting the 600 series to be a little more competitive in gaming, but still getting their butts kicked by a A64 3500 must be embarrasing

I see those "Look out! He's using Intel Extreme technology!" ads in game magazines and just shake my head in sadness. Gaming is the one area where AMD has Intel completely by the balls with no doubt or question, and they do NOTHING to promote this. Why they don't run adverts with graphs like these showing just how superior their products are is beguiling.

Excellent review, as always.

Once again, 3D Mark showing completely different results than real, actual games.

Let's all move on with our lives. Please.

You would think almost 2 billion in R&D would allow Intel to crush AMD; but alas.
I am so happy with my AMD 3500+; it's just so damn pretty!!!!

ATI and NVidia need to take a hint from Intel. They sure did it right this time. Before the NDA even expired and the release was official, you could buy a 600 series P4 from Newegg or ZipZoomFly.

POV Ray is all about the MHz and none about the cache size. That's why the Athlon 64 3500+ matches the performance of the 4000+ (both run at the same speed), and it's also why the P4 600 chips aren't any faster than the 500s.

I hope thats supposed to be 3800, otherwise, I'm really confused.

Very nice article (wasn't expecting such a beast on a Sunday.) Here's looking forward to the 64-bit tests.

I'm hardly surprised with the results, games are the last app to take advanage of extra L2 Cache. The J series does well in media-encoding and probably some other professional apps.

I just got a 530J. I'll be skipping the 600 series.

Whoever makes the faster Dual Core solution, that will be my next upgrade!

Incredible review.

While my gaming rig is an Athlon 64 3500+, I have no great love for any company, well, maybe with the exception of Apple :-) . I was really hoping intel would get competitive again, if for no other reason than to get AMD moving forward again. It seems that every time AMD gets ahead, they just sit on their lead and intel comes out and blows them away. Alas, not this time.

I must say, I suddenly have a longing for a Pentinum M...

So Intel took one year to add 1MB L2 cache, Speedstep, tweak some transistors.. and got the 6xx-series. Not much of an improvement.

WHAT IF they used that one year to add Hyperthreading, SSE3 and some decent desktop chipset to the Pentium M-family instead?

man you guys had this out fast

Will you be able to disable EIST and lock the multiplier at 14x for overclocking purposes?

maybe the power consumption of the new L2 cache is lower than the old one ?

Looking at the die comparison , the blue color certainly makes it look cooler to me ;) , but it also looks more homogenous than the old cache design

Maybe they used some Dothan tricks for the cache or simply concetrated on power consumption when they redesigned it for 2MB

Personally, I find Intel's model numbering scheme less confusing than AMD's - 5xx = 1MB L2 / 6xx = 2 MB L2; x3x = 3 GHz, +/- 200 MHz = +/- 10 model numbers, no different CPUs under the same moniker. Not great, not good, not even decent, but still better than AMD's.

However, no Prescott, no matter how dressed up, will ever enter my house.

How about power draw numbers at medium load? That's where C1E vs Speedstep could show some (admittedly small) difference. I'd wager that most CPUs spend most of their time working at about 20-30% load, so I'd be interested to see how the different power management features stack up around there.