Over the course of the past week, we went through an extensive recode of the RealTime Price Engine front end, in preparation to move the entire beta search capability off PHP/MySQL and onto ASP.NET/MSSQL. As a result, we have seen some interesting boosts in performance in several areas, but also unforeseen drawbacks in performance in others. We are real close to deploying the RTPE into AnandTech’s environment, so expect some pretty awesome changes to the engine in the next few weeks as we continue to migrate!

Also, feel free to check out our QuickSearch RSS feed to get a real time, abbreviated update on all of the best prices in our search engine. You also have the ability to suggest links for RTPE database here. As always, comments and suggestions are extremely appreciated.

Remember that on the AnandTech Price Engine, the graphs and charts from each page continually update, although the content does not.

Since our last CPU guide in January, Intel released the Pentium 6xx lineup and slowly began the trickle of 533FSB Pentium M processors out into the mass markets. AMD also made some significant changes to its product lineup by introducing the Turion 64 initiative; but unfortunately, over a month has rolled by and we are still waiting to see some retail samples.

Intel Pentium 4

Considering the constant delays in the release of processors (or video card, or hard drive, or just about anything else computer related), we were pleasantly surprised when Intel’s Pentium 6xx lineup debuted ahead of schedule, complete with EIST, 2MB of L2 cache and EM64T. Unfortunately for Intel, however, performance was relatively mixed bag without any clear indication that doubling the L2 cache would put the performance of the 6xx (Prescott 2M) SKUs ahead of their similarly clocked 5xx brethren.

Of course, there were some applications that were able to utilize Intel’s extended cache; primarily, Maya’s rendering benchmark in SPECviewperf 8 demonstrated clear advantage in favor of the Prescott 2M.



The immediate introduction of the Prescott 2M actually raised prices in some instances; most notably the Pentium 4 560 [RTPE: BX80547PG3600E]. As you can see from the day by day plot of vendor prices, the 3.2GHz Prescott suffers a serious price increase mid-February and we are still recovering from the fluctuation.

Other Pentium 4 Socket 775 processors experienced similar trends, although we account for some of that to the gradual phase out of the non-NX processors. All Socket 775 processors denoted with a “J” suffix are processors with XD/NX capability, and most merchants seem to interchange processors with these capabilities for vanilla versions of the processor. In the next few weeks, any new Socket 775 processor available for purchase will be a “J” variety processor, so pretty soon, you won’t have a choice. All 6xx processors have the XD technology already enabled.

As an unrelated side note, don’t be surprised if “Pentium 4” processors lose their moniker for a “Pentium D” name instead – like the Celeron D, the D denotes Desktop. We have seen indication of this name change on various roadmaps, but the change will only be cosmetic and affect a few retail boxes; SKUs will remain the same.

Pentium M

For weeks, the Pentium M saga continues to unfold with new chapters almost weekly. This week, the talk of the town seems to be ASUS’s clever little Socket 479 to Socket 478 adaptor, which enables any mild budget 865PE and 875P motherboard to compete with the high end 885GME motherboard solutions from DFI [RTPE: DFI 855GME 855GME-MGF] and AOpen [RTPE: AOpen 855GME i855GMEm-LFS].

Again, our tests proved the Pentium M can completely run the gamut from being a killer overclocker to a complete dog in tests like Unigraphics on SPECviewperf. Surprisingly, however, there were definite performance improvements when using the Pentium M on ASUS’s CT-479; some of which can be attributed to the newer core logic and faster memory capability. As Anand puts it, “There's no reason to even consider an 855GME motherboard from AOpen or DFI; the ASUS solution is cheaper, better performing and is even a much more stable overclocker.” Enough said.



We are slowly starting to introduce 533FSB Pentium M’s into the processor lineup, but availability is still very poor. A few select merchants claim to carry the processors, but in reality, almost all are preorders for the chip. If you pay close attention, you’ll notice many of these chips claim delivery times of up to six weeks! Obviously, we don’t list merchants like that in the RTPE, but buyer beware!

Celeron

As usual, nothing interesting seems to have occurred to the Celeron lineup again. We always recommend Athlon XP or Sempron processors over Celeron chips, since the motherboards and processors are cheaper. This week turns out to be no exception either.



The Celeron D 335 [RTPE: BX80547RE2800C] just squeaks underneath the $100 magic price point. Although we clearly recommend AMD’s solutions over these low end desktop processors, the 2.8GHz Celeron D 335 isn’t half bad for a desktop chip considering the price.

AMD Athlon 64

Little to anyone’s surprise, the 90nm, Socket 939 Athlon 64s remains our processor of choice on the desktop. Choosing the Socket 939 Athlon 64s over the Socket 754 processors is an easy choice for any buyer; the “sweet spot” Socket 939 Athlon 64s cost anywhere from $10 to $20 less than their Socket 754 counterparts. Now that MSI, ASUS and Gigabyte all have relatively inexpensive nForce3, nForce4 and K8T800 Socket 939 options, there should be no excuse to stick with the socket 754 socket.

In our opinion, the greatest advantage of going Socket 939 over 754 is the PCI Express capability. If you already have a nice AGP video card, then perhaps an nForce3 939 motherboard might still be in your future. However, notice that the ATI AGP video cards already lag three months behind their PCIe SKUs. If this trend continues, we will be very lucky to see any current generation AGP cards by the end of the year!



We established Socket 939 as a viable option over Socket 754 without even delving into the ever controversial dual channel versus single channel argument. The Socket 939 chips that we like the best (the Socket 939 Athlon 64 3000+ and Athlon 64 3200+ [RTPE: ADA3000DIK4B, ADA3200DIK4B]) are 90nm processors only. AMD will start to release new 90nm SKUs before the summer, but we are fairly limited to only a few processors at this point. Don’t forget to check out our initial impressions of 90nm AMD processors back in October of last year.

You’ll notice from the chart above that our price engine didn’t pick up any Turion 64 processors anywhere. We were supposed to see Turion laptops by now, but considering the carefree release schedules of everyone from AMD to ATI to Intel to NVIDIA, we probably won’t see laptops or retail processors for several weeks (or months?). The DTR and mobility Athlon 64s don’t appear to be showing any signs of age yet; all of the Athlon 64 DTR processors continue to drop a steady 6% each month – you can almost set your calendar to it.

Last but not least, there are always the little Semprons. The silently launched Socket 754 Sempron 2600+, 2800+ and 3000+ [RTPE: SDA2600AIO2BA, SDA2800AIO3BA, and SDA3000AIO2BA] pack some of the bang-for-buck punches that we have seen in a long time; particularly for sub $100 processors. Only a few merchants carry the newest Semprons, but if you have an older nForce3 motherboard lying around, an $80 Sempron 2600+ becomes an awesome platform to give that pet Linux or PVR project a try.



For those still interested in prolonging the inevitable death of Socket 462, the Sempron lineup offers several modified Athlon XP choices. However, as many die-hard Athlon overclockers know, the wonder chips always were, and still continue to be the Athlon XP Mobile chips.



They aren’t the speed demons that they once were, but for the dollar, you can still crunch some incredible performance out of the Athlon XP Mobility line on chips that will clock higher than their desktop counterparts. If you aren’t ready to take the penalties of the Sempron cache size without willing to give up on Socket A just yet, the XP-M chips are your last hope.

Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron

It looks like it’s finally time for the Opteron 252 to start playing ball in the retail vendor market. We first saw performance of the Opteron 252 and the famous E4 stepping a little over a month ago, and since then, we haven’t been able to keep up with the number of requests from readers and parse engines looking for the product. $800 for the Opteron 252 [RTPE: OSA252FAA5BL] sounds a little bit too much for us to spend on a server processor, but considering the fact that no other Opterons support the SSE3 instruction set or the 90nm production process, the cost may be justified for some forward-looking IT managers.



Intel’s response to the Opteron x52 launch was less publicized; the Iriwindale ( Prescott 2M for servers) launch came and went without much fan fare. The Intel enterprise lineup works opposite to that of AMD’s; Intel’s server platforms are usually the slowest to update to new technologies.



Given that the larger cache size on Iriwindale probably comes in handy for database applications where large L3 caches are vogue, Xeon CPUs with much larger L2 cache could prove a very exciting step forward for Intel’s x86 enterprise lineup as a whole.