Prescott Arrives
34 MAXIMUMPC MARCH 2004
now. Currently, Intel has three fabs ready to
crank out Prescott CPUs.
Pricing on Prescott and the two other
3.4GHz Pentium 4s wasn’t available at
press time but you can expect them to take
the place of the company’s existing top
chips. Thus the 3.4GHz P4 Prescott (as well
as the Northwood version) will probably
cost close to $637. The Extreme Edition will
still cost close to $1,000 per chip.Q: How far into the future will
Prescott take us? Will we see
an Extreme Edition version?
By design, Prescott should hit 5GHz with-
out breaking a sweat, but later this year,
Intel is expected to introduce a successor
to Prescott code-named Tejas. Tejas will
also be a 90nm CPU, but will run on a
new 1066MHz bus and include even more
improved Hyper-Threading and possibly
even more instructions. More importantly,Tejas is expected to be rolled out with a
new type of CPU interface that will make
Socket 478 obsolete. Additionally, Tejas
chipsets will also introduce PCI Express,
PCI Express for graphics, DDR2, and a new
24-bit audio spec for motherboards called
Azalia, or High Definition Audio.
We expect Tejas to be the CPU dubbed
Pentium 5. In the meantime, Intel is still
contemplating the introduction of an
Extreme Edition version of the Prescott
with additional L3. Exactly how much
cache, and when a Prescott EE might be
released aren’t known. We’re not holding
our breath. We’re betting that Intel is pin-
ning its hopes on Tejas becoming enough
of an A64 killer that the company won’t
even need to invest in making larger cache
versions of its chips to compete.Q: Would you buy a Prescott?
The short answer is no. We’re performancefreaks, and right now the Pentium 4
Extreme Edition is the CPU tickling us in all
the right places. However, at higher clock
speeds, it’s clear that Prescott will definitely
be a force to be reckoned with. At that
point, we’ll be all over it. But at its present
speeds, it’s in a firm third place.
The longer answer is that there’s
good and bad news for Intel. The good
news is that despite the snide com-
ments calling the Pentium 4 Extreme
Edition the “expensive” or “emergency”
edition, the P4 EE remains the fastest
CPU in town. Indeed, we were pretty
impressed by the chip in our three-way
showdown (“CPU Slugfest,” December
2003). Now at 3.4GHz, the chip is even
more dominating. In almost every
benchmark, the P4 EE pulled away from
AMD’s Athlon 64 FX and made a mock-
ery of the 3.2GHz Prescott. In applica-
tion tests, the P4EE took a pasting only2.2GHz Athlon 3.4GHz Pentium 3.2GHz Pentium 3.2GHz Pentium
CPU 64 FX-51 4 Extreme 4 Extreme 4 Prescott
Overall 172 202 187 185
Internet Content Creation Overall 200 230 214 213
3D Creation 193 220 205 203
2D Creation 244 282 260 257
Web Production 170 195 183 185
Offi ce Productivity Overall 148 177 163 160
Communication 143 159 145 143
Document Creation 177 213 196 178
Data Analysis 127 164 153 161
Photoshop 7.01 MPC All Filters (sec) 288 259 263 304
Mathematica 5 (sec) 551.3 612.8 646.6 703.1
Premiere Pro video render (sec) 742 520 552 546
MusicMatch 8.1 (sec) 281 231 242 275Sisoft Sandra 2004 RAM INT (MB/s) 5648 4712 4688 4802
Sisoft Sandra 2004 RAM Float (MB/s) 5569 4694 4677 4811ViewPerf 7.1.1 3Dsmax-02 (fps) 12.85 13.04 12.87 13.16
ViewPerf 7.1.1 Dvr-09 (fps) 42.89 36.69 36 39.75
ViewPerf 7.1.1 Dx-08 (fps) 81.92 83.62 82.05 84.92
ViewPerf 7.1.1 Light-06 (fps) 15.80 15.86 15.4 14.42
ViewPerf 7.1.1 ProE-02 (fps) 15.32 15.11 14.82 15.05
ViewPerf 7.1.1 UGS-03 (fps) 24.99 23.66 23.04 23.653DMark03 340 Overall 5879 5924 5879 5843
3DMark03 340 CPU 820 841 798 734
3DMark2001 SE Overall 19900 19951 19613 18303
AquaMark 3 CPU 9902 10546 10241 9683
Halo 1280x1024 33.75 34.33 34.2 36.1
Quake III Demo 4 417.8 458 439.6 361.7
Jedi Academy 85 94.4 90.8 90.7
Comanche 8x6 68.9 73.12 69.6 54.37
UT2003 Demo Fly-by 8x6 306 290.9 282.2 246.4
UT2003 Demo Botmatch 8x6 99 95.3 90.5 80.6Shooting the PipelineGamesOpen GL Synthetic SYSmark 2004 Applications*Red denotes highest scoreQ
Q: How far into the future willQ
Q: How far into the future will
Prescott take us? Will we see
QPrescott take us? Will we see
an Extreme Edition version?
Q
an Extreme Edition version?
By design, Prescott should hit 5GHz with-
Q
By design, Prescott should hit 5GHz with-Q
Q: Would you buy a Prescott?Q
Q: Would you buy a Prescott?
The short answer is no. We’re performance
QThe short answer is no. We’re performance