Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/896
Intel's Pentium 4 2.4GHz: Taking the Lead
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 2, 2002 5:17 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
One of Intel's major marketing pushes for the Pentium 4 processor has been its ability to scale to incredibly high clock speeds. Architecturally we've explained countless times how Intel is able to accomplish this through the lengthening of the CPU's primary pipeline and the use of low latency caches. To the end user however, all that is understood in the end is a higher clock speed.
A side effect of Intel's intense marketing focus on clock speed (and AMD's marketing focus on IPC) is that many users seem to devalue the clock speed bumps that the Pentium 4 has seen. This may be partially due to the success of AMD's new modeling system or simply because a good portion of the market realizes that AMD CPUs are offering equal or greater performance at noticeably lower clock speeds.
It's difficult to explain over and over again the two different approaches that AMD and Intel take to microprocessor design which result in the difference in the way the Athlon XPs and Pentium 4s are marketed today.
In the end what truly matters is the overall performance of the CPUs and the price they're going for. If AMD accomplishes great performance through high IPC rates and lower costs through small die sizes, or if Intel does the same through high clock speeds and larger Silicon wafers, so long as the end result is a high-performance, low-cost CPU the end user should be satisfied.
Just last month we took a look at the AMD Athlon XP 2100+ which typifies AMD's approach to microprocessor design; the CPU was clocked almost 25% lower than the fastest Pentium 4 CPU but kept up quite well through the use of shorter pipelines and raw execution power. Today we'll be looking at the latest in Intel's aggressive roadmap for the Pentium 4. Now clocked at 2.4GHz the Pentium 4 is far from the CPU we scorned back in November of 2000.
Still not 533MHz and not a new Core
Although there's a lot of talk about the 533MHz (133MHz quad-pumped) FSB, this Pentium 4 won't be the one to show it off. In fact it will be after this release that Intel will officially introduce the 533MHz FSB for the Pentium 4 in order to make room for 400MHz FSB Celeron processors based on a NetBurst core. This should quickly alert the cautious buyer in you to put away the credit card until the 533MHz FSB units are launched. We have already provided benchmarks showing the improvements just going to the 533MHz FSB can offer; if you pair the 533MHz FSB with PC1066 RDRAM (not a supported configuration on any of the first 533MHz FSB chipsets) then the performance will be even better.
It shouldn't look any different
The other tidbit of information that may come as a disappointment (but by no means a surprise) to some is that the 2.4GHz CPUs being tested and shipped today are not using a new core. A CNet News.com article that was run last week gave the impression that the 2.4GHz Pentium 4 processors being released today would feature a 10% die shrink and thus reduce manufacturing costs.
The die shrink will occur, however it won't be for another few months. These CPUs are still being produced on 200mm wafers and are thus the same Northwood cores that were released at the beginning of this year. Over the next few months as production moves to the new 300mm wafers Intel will release a new stepping of the core that does in fact reduce the die size by 10%. Although this will reduce manufacturing costs, the end user won't see any tangible benefits from a performance standpoint.
All that is required for the 2.4GHz Pentium 4 to run is BIOS support for the multiplier and clock speed so that the CPU can be properly reported at POST time.
The Test
All of the benchmarks used in this review are identical to those used in our Athlon XP 2100+ Review. For more thorough descriptions of the tests we suggest you read through the benchmark sections of that review first.
Just as we introduced in our 2100+ Review, this review features CPU scaling charts at the bottom of every benchmark page. These charts are designed to illustrate how the performance of various CPU families scales with clock speeds; the goal being to help point out whether a CPU's performance is continuing to scale linearly with clock speed or if the laws of diminishing returns are kicking in.
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Windows XP Test System |
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Hardware |
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CPU(s) |
AMD
Athlon XP 1.73GHz (2100+) AMD Athlon XP 1.67GHz (2000+) AMD Athlon XP 1.53GHz (1800+) AMD Athlon XP 1.40GHz (1600+) AMD Athlon-C 1.40GHz |
Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz |
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| Motherboard(s) | EPoX 8KHA+ | ASUS P4T-E (Intel 850) | |||||
| Memory |
256MB
PC800 Mushkin RDRAM |
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| Hard Drive |
Maxtor D740X Ultra ATA/133 80GB HDD |
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| CDROM |
Phillips 48X |
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| Video Card(s) |
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB DDR |
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| Ethernet |
Linksys LNE100TX 100Mbit PCI Ethernet Adapter |
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Software |
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Operating System |
Windows XP |
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| Video Drivers |
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Content Creation Performance
We start out our benchmark analysis with some content creation tests as usual. The first of the bunch is the 2002 edition of Ziff Davis Media's Content Creation Winstone. As with previous versions of Content Creation Winstone, the premise of the test is to run through a script of a handful of applications (in this case 7) and perform various tasks in the applications while switching between one or more of them. The idea is to simulate a present-day multitasking environment using content creation applications, the 7 application tested are listed below:
Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1
Adobe Premiere 6.0
Macromedia Director 8.5
Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev 4
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055
Netscape Navigator 6/6.01
Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 5.0c (build 184)
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Creation Performance Content Creation Winstone 2002 |
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34.8Looking at the numbers alone, the move to 2.4GHz gives the Pentium 4 the advantage over the recently released Athlon XP 2100+. In terms of noticeable performance, most users would be hard pressed to find any differences between any of the CPUs faster than the Pentium 4 2.0A.
Here we can see that both the Athlon XP and Pentium 4 are continuing to scale well with clock speed. In our 2100+ review we mentioned that it would take a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 to intersect (or surpass) the performance curve of the Athlon XP and indeed it has.
SYSMark 2002
With this review we continue to use SYSMark 2002; SYSMark 2002 can be considered to be a much more memory bandwidth intensive version of the Winstone tests. The benchmark is split into two parts, Internet Content Creation which deals with content creation applications (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc...) and Office Productivity which is more general usage oriented (Word, Excel, Netscape, Anti-Virus, etc...).
The 2002 update changes things around a bit; first of all the benchmark's total scores are arrived at differently than in the 2001 benchmark. Windows Media Encoder no longer accounts for close to half of the Internet Content Creation test, rather only about 10%. There is also no need for a special Athlon XP SSE patch as the 2002 suite uses a version of the encoding dll that properly detects SSE support on all Palomino cores as well as Pentium 4 cores.
The rest of the benchmark is much more evenly distributed and it is much more memory bandwidth intensive than the old benchmark. The Internet Content Creation tests on average use about 600MB/s of bandwidth vs 300MB in SYSMark 2001. The Office Productivity tests are still stuck at around 580MB/s of memory bandwidth.
For more information on the tests and the applications used consult this whitepaper provided by BAPCo.
| Internet
Content Creation Performance Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002 |
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The Pentium 4 platforms have always been favored in this test as the nature of their architecture and the high memory-bandwidth platforms themselves tend to make for good performers in most ICC environments.
The Pentium 4 continues to scale well with the 9% increase in clock speed resulting in close to a 6% boost in performance for the 2.4GHz processor.
| General
Usage Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2002 |
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The introduction of the 2.4GHz Pentium 4 puts the distance between the fastest Athlon XP and the fastest Pentium 4 just at 10% which is the unofficial threshold for being able to notice performance differences in real-world applications.
The Office Productivity performance curves are definitely not as smooth as some of the Content Creation curves we've seen. These applications don't benefit much from a 200MHz increase in clock speed as they are mostly cache, memory and disk I/O dependent so long as you have a fast enough processor.
Media Encoding Performance
Our media encoding tests haven't changed from previous CPU reviews, the only slight modification is the use of a newer version of Lame with better MMX, SSE and SSE2 support.
| MPEG-4
Encoding Performance Xmpeg 4.2a - Divx 4.12 Codec - YUV2 720 x 480 - DD5.1 Sound - 29.97 fps Frames Encoded per Second |
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At 2.4GHz the Pentium 4 is able to extend its performance margin over the XP 2100+ to just over 12%.
As this graph clearly shows, MPEG-4 encoding scales very well with clock speed regardless of what microprocessor architecture we're talking about. Given enough memory and FSB bandwidth, we should be able to see these curves continue like this for many more speed bumps.
| MP3
Encoding Performance Lame MP3 Encoder 3.91 -v -V 0 Time in Minutes to Encode 170MB .wav File |
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There is about a 5 - 7% performance difference between the Pentium 4 2.4GHz and the Athlon XP 2100+ in the MP3 encoding test. Luckily MP3 encoding has become much less of a CPU hog courtesy of much more robust CPUs compared to what was out when the codec first started gaining footing among music fans.
Unlike the MPEG-4 encoding chart we are beginning to see some signs of performance leveling off as clock speed increases. We could be running into a bottleneck elsewhere in the system, not necessarily within the CPU.
3D Rendering Performance
Our 3D rendering tests are also brought over from previous CPU reviews. Both scores are reported in terms of images rendered per hour.
| 3D
Rendering Performance 3D Studio MAX 4.2.6 Waterfall.max (Rendered Images per Hour - Higher is better) |
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The Athlon has historically done very well in 3D rendering applications because of their dependency on raw x87 FP calculations and limited use of SIMD instructions. With the speed bump to 2.4GHz however, the Pentium 4 is able to match the performance of the Athlon XP 2100+.
Just as we mentioned in our 2100+ Review, it did take a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 in order to provide equal performance to that seen on the Athlon XP curve.
| 3D
Rendering Performance Maya 4.0.1 Rendertest (Rendered Images per Hour - Higher is better) |
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The situation doesn't change much under Maya; although the 2.4GHz CPU gains a slight numerical advantage over the XP 2100+, that doesn't translate into much of a real world performance difference.
3D Gaming Performance
To measure 3D gaming performance we've chosen the Unreal Performance Test 2002 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. For information on the Unreal Performance Test 2002 you can read about it here and here.
| Next-Generation
3D Gaming Performance Unreal Performance Test 2002 - 1024 x 768 x 32 |
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How will the 2.4GHz Pentium 4 run the next-generation of first person shooter titles? Fairly well. The 2.4GHz Pentium 4 takes the top of the UPT2002 performance chart and gives the Athlon XP 2100+ some good competition.
This is actually a very important chart to pay attention to as it illustrates the scaling of these three CPU cores under what will definitely be a game engine used in many popular games on the horizon. Games that are already in development include Unreal Tournament 2003.
| 3D
Gaming Performance Return to Castle Wolfenstein - 1024 x 768 - High Quality |
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At 2.4GHz, the Pentium 4 is able to extend a 8.6% lead over the Athlon XP 2100+. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is an important benchmark to look at since the Quake III Engine it is based on is used in a number of other games including the recently released Jedi Knight 2.
Just as we mentioned last time, the performance curves have just intersected and we expect to see very competitive gaming performance from both higher clocked Northwood CPUs and the upcoming Thoroughbred based Athlon XP processors.
PCMark2002
We included PCMark2002 in our Athlon XP 2100+ Review for the first time and we've decided to keep the scores in for this review as well. The PCMark2002 suite tests things like file compression, JPEG decompression, MPEG-4 encoding and decoding, among other types of tasks. For more information on the benchmark take a look at MadOnion.com.
| Overall
Performance PCMark 2002 CPU Score |
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Final Words
As the last 100MHz FSB Pentium 4 processor there's not much you can say about the 2.4GHz part; on the one hand it has given Intel the performance crown in all of the measurable categories, but on the other it lacks the 133MHz FSB support that will give its successors a little extra boost.
The Athlon and Athlon XP processors have been outperforming Intel's Pentium 4 line ever since its release in November of 2000; but now with the Northwood core and higher clock speeds, the performance game is much more competitive. Bringing the 133MHz FSB to the table will grant these CPUs another 0 - 15% boost in performance (depending on the application, but most will be around 5%) and that performance delta will only grow as applications become more demanding and the Pentium 4 increases in clock speed even more.
In terms of frequency headroom, the Northwood core definitely has a lot of breathing room. It's not difficult at all to take even these 2.4GHz CPUs up to close to 3GHz levels without resorting to anything other than conventional air-cooling. It will be very interesting to see what sort of headroom the 0.13-micron AMD Thoroughbred core offers as it could bring AMD some very compelling clock speed options going forward.
The one area where AMD still holds the advantage over Intel (at least in the DIY enthusiast market) is in pricing. The Athlon XPs are still more affordable than the Pentium 4s when comparing model numbers to identical clock speed Northwood cores (e.g. XP 2000+ to a Pentium 4 2.0A). The move down to 0.13-micron cores will grant AMD even more pricing flexibility if necessary. On the Intel side, the use of 300mm wafers helps cut production costs by significant amounts as well.
By now we have already said good-bye to two of the most highly anticipated CPU cores in recent memory. Intel's Northwood won't change much outside of being officially validated for 133MHz FSB operation while AMD's Thoroughbred will put their 0.13-micron process to the test. Intel has the potential to pull ahead even more in the performance game provided that AMD doesn't introduce Barton with any architectural enhancements. However, the rules of the game will change once Hammer hits.
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