X-bit labs

Intel Prescott: One More Willamette-like Slow Processor or a Worthy Piece? (page 7)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 02/01/2004 | 12:01 PM ]

However, let’s check the actual speed of Prescott’s cache-memory, especially since there are new surprises waiting here for us. To measure the performance and latency of the cache and the memory we resorted to Cache Burst 32 utility. The test system where we performed all the measurements was based on ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe mainboard on i875P chipset and featured dual-channel DDR400 SDRAM with 2-3-2-6 timings. For our experiments we used Pentium 4 processor on Northwood core, Pentium 4 processor on Prescott core and Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, all working at 3.2GHz. For a more illustrative comparison we also considered the results shown by Athlon 64 platforms. One of the competitor systems was built on Athlon 64 FX-51 CPU working at 2.2GHz and dual-channel Registered DDR400 SDRAM with the timings set to 2-3-2-6, and the second competitor system featured an Athlon 64 3400+ working at 2.2GHz core clock frequency and supported DDR400 memory with the same timings. All other components of our testbeds do not affect the results of this test that is why we will not mention them here.

First of all we measured the bandwidth of the memory subsystems of our platforms. You can see the memory performance comparison for systems based on Pentium 4 (Prescott), Pentium 4 (Northwood) and Pentium 4 Extreme Edition when we worked with data blocks of different sizes.

However, the graphs allow only a qualitative analysis. To draw more indepth conclusions, we will turn to exact performance numbers including those obtained on AMD platforms as well.