in Mathematica 5. That’s no shocker—
the Athlon XP and Athlon 64 simply
have better floating-point performance.
Surprisingly, Prescott pulls out a vic-
tory over both P4EE and A64FX in Halo.
Unfortunately, faster Halo frame rates are
about the only good news for the CPU in
gaming. In general, the Prescott turns in
pretty poor frame rates against the P4EE at
the same clock speeds and the Athlon 64.
The Prescott does hold its own in SYSmark
2004, though, and beat the mighty P4EE
in Premiere Pro. Unfortunately, the P4EE
smokes the Prescott in MusicMatch,
Photoshop, and Mathematica.
Against the Athlon 64, the Prescott only
manages to eke out wins in columns favor-
able to the P4 architectur e: Premiere Pro,
MusicMatch, Jedi Academy, and SYSmark
2004. It wouldn’t be fair to describe
Prescott’s performance as dismal because
it performs pretty closely to two extremely
fast CPUs, particularly in applications. Only
in gaming does the Prescott flag.
Be that as it may, with all the tinkering
Intel has done to the core, we expected
better performance out of the Prescott, so
we’re disappointed. If there’s a silver lining
here, it’s that Intel has at least managed
to keep the chip close to the speed of the
current Northwood core despite a much
longer pipeline.
With this said, we fully understand that
Prescott won’t hit its stride until it gets to
4GHz or so, but at the end of all our test-
ing, we couldn’t help but wonder if perfor-
mance really isn’t the major reason why
Intel rejected the Pentium 5 name. n
Just about everyone agrees that
AMD’s Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64
CPUs are a hit when you consider
their price-to-performance ratios.
AMD’s big problem is making
enough of the CPUs to sell at
effective prices. Still, using a 130-
nanometer process, both A64s are
simply too big and too expensive
to make in higher volumes.
This year, AMD will attempt
to remedy this by rushing to get
its own 90-nanometer process going.
The first 90nm CPU, dubbed San Diego,
will arrive sometime in the spring with
clock speed projections in the 2.60GHz
range. The CPU will also use a new
Socket 939 interface which will allow
the FX to use more common memory
instead of hard-to-find registered RAM.
Like Intel, AMD will eventually abandon
the Socket 754 and Socket 940 interface
for this new socket, but has pledged to
support both older interfaces for a rea-
sonable amount of time.
AMD’s real ace in the hole for its CPUs
is a feature called “execution protection,”
which is also known as “no execute,”
or simply “NX”. Microsoft’s upcoming
Service Pack 2 for Windows XP (see
page 13) will rely on the CPU’s ability to
mark regions of memory where code
cannot be executed. Microsoft expects
NX to help reduce the amount of buf-
fer-overflow viruses and worms, such as
the MSBlaster worm. The good news for
AMD, and the bad news for Intel, is that
NX apparently requires hardware support
at the processor level. And so far, only64-bit chips support it: Athlon 64, Athlon
64 FX, Opteron, and Intel’s Itanium.
Intel’s official word is that it is “evaluat-
ing supporting this feature in our client
products.” We take that to mean “no” or
“not yet.” With security becoming a big-
ger and bigger issue, you can bet Intel is
scrambling to include some kind of sup-
port for NX.
“My sense is that Intel was blind-
sided by it,” says analyst Rob Enderle
of the Enderle Group, who wrote about
the issue last year. Enderle says NX
capabilities will be a big selling point of
the A64 this year—especially to corpo-
rate users, who tend to be a bit more
paranoid about security.
Finally, AMD should also see a
Windows OS for its 64-bit CPUs some-
time this summer or fall. We hope.The CompetitionJust about everyone agrees that
AMD’s Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64
CPUs are a hit when you consider
their price-to-performance ratios.
AMD’s big problem is making
enough of the CPUs to sell at
effective prices. Still, using a 130-
nanometer process, both A64s are
simply too big and too expensive
to make in higher volumes.
This year, AMD will attempt
to remedy this by rushing to get
its own 90-nanometer process going.
The first 90nm CPU, dubbed San Diego,
will arrive sometime in the spring withThe Competitionits own 90-nanometer process going.
AMD’s Athlon 64 series may be
the only desktop CPUs supporting
a feature in Microsoft’s upcoming
Windows XP Service Pack 2 that
prevents buffer overflows.AMD 2004: steady as she goes