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| Tomorrow has Arrived...... Welcome to CALROG.COM! | Dec. '00 Headlines |
Pentium 4 Released; Where's the Fanfare? By C. Rogers, 12.00 After much delay and publicity, the Pentium 4 was finally released on November 20th, 2000. While the chip name should have been revolutionary in name, it ends up looking like a moderate disappointment for the Big Blue giant of Santa Clara. Even with high clock speed numbers, and internal architecture improvements, this chip yet shows no justifiable reason to replace the Pentium III or Athlon. On paper, the Pentium 4 looks pretty darn good. The new P4 chips, which debuted at 1.4 and 1.5 GHz, sport a quad-pumped 100 MHz bus (for an effective 400 MHz transfer rate). 144 new multimedia instructions were embedded into the chip, called SSE2. And one bragging right can be given to the new chip-- on some selected 3D games, the Pentium 4 is presently the clear leader. However, there are some embarrassing features for the Pentium 4 chip. First, the chip only has an 8 KB L1 cache... Intel stated that the small size is justified by including a 96 KB trace cache, which should "offset" work from the Level one cache. Intel believes the new trace cache will help in its benchmarks. At this point, early testing by hardware tech sites show absolutely no advantage to having this cache. When compared to the Pentium III processor, the Pentium 4 is lower-performing per clock speed. In some benchmarks, standard office suites only have a 4-5% performance gain with a P4 1.5 GHz chip when compared to a PIII 1.0 GHz counterpart. This is very marginal, because in theory, the fastest Pentium 4 should have a 50% performance advantage over a 1 GHz Pentium III! Also, in certain applications, the gigahertz chip beat out the 1.4 GHz P4... This does not show well for a new high-priced chip trying to be the performance leader. To add insult to injury, Intel's main competitor AMD, smokes out their flagship 1.5 GHz CPU with their 1.2 GHz Athlon. When coupled with the fact that the Pentium 4 motherboards only support RDRAM-based solutions, it is really hard to embrace this new technology set forth by Intel . RIMMs are over-priced, underperforming proprietary modules-- something Intel needs to dump. So far, the infant days for the Pentium 4 look bleak. While the architecture isn't perfect, the comparison to the Pentium III processor will end some time next year when a 1.7 GHz chip is announced. Under the Tualitin core, the Pentium III will most likely cease operation at 1.26 GHz mark. Hopefully by then, the Pentium 4 will be tweaked a little bit in architecture, and have official support for DDR-SDRAM. |
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