Intel Pentium 4 1.4GHz Review. Part 2: Processor Performance Analysis

by FastSite
11/25/2000 | 12:00 AM

Here we are going to discuss the benchmarks and the results obtained on Pentium 4 based system. For more details on the Pentium 4 architecture and peculiar features see Intel Pentium 4 1.4GHz Review. Part 1.

Performance

We compared the performance of Intel Pentium 4 with the today's fastest CPUs: Intel Pentium III 1GHz and AMD Athlon 1.2GHz. For our tests we had three testbeds configured as follows:

All tests were run under Windows2000 SP1 with DirectX 8.0 installed.

Below you can see a picture of the PC based on Intel Pentium 4 1.4GHz processor, which took part in our tests.

Since Pentium 4 CPU features a totally new architecture, we decided to split the performance analysis into two parts. First we will resort to synthetic benchmarks to take the processor performance, and then we will take a look at it in real applications.

This test shows the performance of the CPU integer unit and data processing speeds. Actually, you have every reason to consider Pentium 4 the fastest in this benchmark, because as we have told you in the first part of our review, its ALU works at twice the core frequency. However, your supposition will never come true. And it is the small L1 cache, which is to blame here, because it is unable to cache all the necessary data. AMD Athlon, which can boast a 64KB L1 cache, which is 8 times larger than that of Pentium 4, easily beats all its competitors in CPUmark99.

This benchmark shows the "pure" arithmetic coprocessor performance, because all the data its uses when running fit into the processor L1 cache. The results prove once again that Athlon has a very good FPU. Besides, you can also clearly see that the increased FPU latency by Pentium 4 makes it perform even worse than Pentium III here.

This benchmark belongs to 3DMark2000 set and shows the theoretical CPU performance during typical 3D gaming scenes processing when SSE SIMD instructions and 3DNow! are actively used. Unfortunately, there are no tests available yet, which could let us assess the performance gain provided by the new Pentium 4 SSE2 instructions that's why today we will speak only about the basic SSE instructions. Nevertheless, even in this case Pentium 4 appears quite impressive and manages to surpass its closest competitor, Athlon 1.2GHz by almost 12%. So, it seems quite logical to suppose that Pentium 4 will perform well in games supporting SSE.

Pentium 4 works in a new platform and uses dual-channel RDRAM. Therefore, it may be pretty interesting to compare the memory speed this platform provides with that shown on the other two platforms. Take a look:

The graphs show very clearly that L1 and L2 caches of the new Pentium 4 CPU became tangibly faster than those in Pentium III. However, AMD Athlon with a much larger L1 cache sometimes manages to beat its new competitor. Of course, the graphs also show that dual-channel RDRAM bandwidth is much higher than the bandwidth of PC133 SDRAM used in Athlon and Pentium III systems. Besides, the results prove once again that AMD Athlon L2 cache works slower than that of Pentium III because of a narrower bus. And the last, but not the least, curious observation is the fact that L1 cache of Pentium 4 doesn't influence the performance on memory write operations.

Now let pass over to the real applications.

This test measures the system performance in a few applications aimed at content creation. As you can see, Pentium 4 based system performs faster than Pentium III 1GHz based one and very close to AMD Athlon based system. So, it turns out that AMD guys were absolutely right when they decided to take their time and not to launch any CPUs faster than 1.2GHz, because even Athlon 1.2GHz easily beats Pentium 4.

This is one more test taking the performance in office applications. However, here the range of considered applications is much wider and as a result, AMD Athlon proves even more successful here. But since the architectures of the CPUs participating in these tests are too different from one another, the picture changes in every application. So, let's look at each application separately:

As you can see, it's pretty hard to single out an indisputable leader. AMD Athlon 1.2GHz appears the fastest in 7 applications out of 12, while Pentium 4 proves the leader in 3 applications: Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred 4.0 (speech recognition), Adobe Photoshop 5.5 (graphics editing) and Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 4.0 (video stream encoding). So, Pentium 4 appears really useful only for data stream processing. Although it owes one half of its laurels to the memory subsystem, which provides much higher bandwidth than the competing systems.

To estimate the system performance in this 3D modelling application we took the time each system required to render Anisotropic Wheel scene at 800x600. So, take note that the smaller is the value (the less time the system needed), the better. Strange as it might seem, but Intel Pentium 4 1.4GHz performs just like Pentium III 1GHz. It means that Pentium 4 FPU is really slower than that of Pentium III at the same frequencies. Athlon 1.2GHz left both Intel competitors far behind having completed the task 40% faster than they did.

Testing the CPUs with the archiving applications allows seeing the integer performance of the processor when working with small amounts of data. In WinZip AMD Athlon 1.2GHz proved the fastest (note that the smaller is the value, the faster is the CPU). It is most likely to be thanks to a larger L1 cache.

Here again the smaller value denotes faster work. As you can see from the chart, Pentium 4 1.4GHz with its ALU working at 2.8GHz surpasses all our expectations. This archiving utility uses a relatively large dictionary and hence Athlon's large L1 cache loses its advantages.

And now we would like to say a few words about the gaming applications and the results obtained there.

In Quake3 Pentium 4 1.4GHz performed very beautifully and surpassed Athlon 1.2GHz by nearly 30%, not to mention the Pentium III, of course. Again, this impressive result was achieved due to 2.8GHz ALU working frequency of Pentium 4. Besides, Quake3 uses SSE instructions, which are executed quite fast by Pentium 4, as we have already shown above.

On the one hand, the fps rate at higher resolutions in Quake3 depends mostly on the bandwidth of the buses between different system components. However, on the other hand, the fps rate is restricted by the fillrate of the graphics card used in the system tested. This is exactly the reason why the performance doesn't differ so greatly here compared to the previous test. Nevertheless, Quad Pumped bus of the Pentium 4 processor helps it to remain among the leaders. Though Athlon 1.2GHz with its 200MHz EV6 bus is so threateningly close to it!

Here Athlon is the No 1 processor, especially due to its fastest FPU.

However, as soon as the buses workload gets higher and the resolution grows, Pentium 4 resumes the leading position. Well, we have to admit that a 400MHz FSB and the memory with 3.2GB/sec bandwidth are quite hard to compete with.

Expendable is the kind of game processing small amounts of data all the time with very high intensity. That's why Pentium 4 based system with RDRAM, which features higher latency, falls behind everyone else here. Note that the gap between Athlon 1.2GHz and Pentium 4 1.4GHz appears quite significant: over 30%!

The results are just the same as we saw in the previous case.

Unfortunately, we can't say anything about Pentium 4 overclocking potential now. The thing is that the mainboard we had at our disposal, Intel D850GB, didn't allow running the CPU at the frequencies other than the nominal one. However, as soon as we put our hands on the Pentium 4 mainboards from other manufacturers we will definitely offer you some overclocking experiments.

Conclusions

Well, we can't draw any definite conclusion concerning Pentium 4 performance. Of course, we have to admit that its new architecture has the whole bunch of cool advantages, which will allow Intel to easily increase the processor working frequencies later on. However, the performance of this CPU in some applications still leaves much to be desired: very often Pentium 4 falls behind Athlon processor, because of the super deep 20-stage pipeline and a relatively small L1 data cache. That's why we dare predict that in the nearest future Pentium 4 won't be able to beat Athlon CPU, which also can get higher working frequencies due to the upcoming shift to a new Palomino core and DDR SDRAM support.

At the same time, Pentium 4 based systems have a couple of really bad drawbacks, and the most disappointing one is the price. Since it is not only the CPU that is so expensive, but also the RDRAM and the mainboards for Pentium 4, AMD Athlon based systems can boast a much more favorable price-to-performance ratio.

Nevertheless, Pentium 4 is not so hopeless. As soon as Intel shifts to 0.13 micron manufacturing technology and introduces new chipsets supporting cheaper memory than the today's RDRAM, Pentium 4 may be able to win the mass market. And in the meanwhile, it is destined to sit only in High-End workstations.