For some time, Intel and archrival AMD have been waging an ideological battle. While Intel has largely stuck to its tried-and-true formula--the greater the gigahertz the better--AMD has sought to shift the focus away from clock speed toward overall performance and other features. With its new Prescott chips, which Intel announced on February 2, Intel attempts to have it both ways.
An enhanced version of the Pentium 4, Prescott offers several advances that should eventually make it the fastest desktop chip around; it should hit 4GHz by the end of this year, according to Intel. The new manufacturing process results in a more powerful core architecture, and the chip features a larger L2 cache--1MB vs. 512K in the current P4. Prescott also supposedly has better Hyper-Threading, which helps the PC handle multiple tasks simultaneously.
Paving the road to multimedia nirvana
But Prescott is more than the latest speed bump (in fact, as we discovered during testing, it isn't even Intel's fastest processor to date). It's also the heartbeat of a slew of new technologies designed to push PCs into living rooms and dens, thanks to new tweaks to audio and video performance. When paired with the Grantsdale chipset, due sometime this spring, Prescott-based systems will both support advanced audio, including 7.1 surround sound, and double as wireless access points for networking with consumer electronics devices. Toss in new technologies, such as Serial ATA and PCI Express, which speed data back and forth to hard drives, graphics cards, and other system components, and you have a solid foundation for home theater, as well as for computing.
At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Intel demonstrated this multimedia message with the E PC, a desktop-cum-set-top box that doubles as a digital video recorder, an audio jukebox, and a photo library--the next step in the evolution of the Media Center PC. Gateway and other manufacturers have already licensed the design, and they plan to release systems based on it later this year.
Intel's four new Prescott chips run at speeds of 2.8GHz, 3.0GHz, 3.2GHz, and 3.4GHz. To distinguish them from the existing P4s (known as Northwoods), Intel inserted an E into the name, as in 2.8EGHz. For this story, we tested four high-end PCs. The first three we looked at featured the 3.2EGHz P4, and later we got our hands on a hard-to-come-by 3.4EGHz Prescott in the Polywell Qbox 865T. The initial manufacturing yield of the 3.4EGHz Prescott chips was exceedingly low, making them quite rare, although we expect that we'll see more of them as Intel refines the manufacturing process. All of the chips performed at the high level we expected, with the 3.4EGHz Polywell unsurprisingly leading the pack. Overall, however, these first Prescott PCs delivered about the same performance on mainstream applications as that of similarly equipped PCs using the existing Northwood P4s at the same clock speed, such as the Compaq X09 Gaming PC. Moreover, none of them could hold a candle to the Falcon Northwest Mach V, using the souped-up 3.4GHz P4 Extreme Edition, a chip that Intel also announced with Prescott that uses the same Northwood design but with a big dollop of L3 cache.
Why doesn't Prescott outperform Northwoods? Prescott's processing pipeline is longer than that of the existing P4, effectively canceling out any of the Prescott's immediate performance gains. We saw this scenario before, however, when Intel moved from Pentium III to Pentium 4, and the lesson here is also the same: wait. As Intel cranks up the clock speed and companion technologies come online, Prescott-based systems should deliver both better performance and innovative features at competitive prices.
Read the CNET editor's take
|
|
8.2 out of 10
