Intel Prescott: the benchmarks

The 3.2GHz Prescott Pentium 4 is slightly faster in some tests than its 3.2GHz Northwood predecessor, but mostly it is slightly slower. This should come as no surprise, since all new Intel desktop processors tend to be slower than their predecessors at the same clock speed. This was particularly true of the first Pentium 4, which only overtook the 1GHz Pentium III when its clock speed reached 1.5GHz.

‘What is Intel up to?’, one might well ask. The answer is simple: as far as Intel’s marketing department is concerned, 'megahertz sells'. By contrast to the mobile market (where the Pentium M that drives Centrino notebooks is approximately as fast at 1.8GHz as the Pentium 4 at 2.4GHz), traditional thinking applies in the desktop space. With its extended 31-stage pipeline, the Prescott Pentium 4 is generally slightly slower than its predecessor, despite having double the cache. But the longer pipeline means that Intel can continue to drive up Prescott’s clock speed.

Remember, though, that at 3.2GHz no other desktop processor requires as much power as the Prescott Pentium 4, which should reach 4GHz by the end of 2004. ‘Megahertz sells’? We shall see.

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1. When will IT departments realise that Intel proces... Andrew Cannon
2. Thanks for the great review. It was good to see a... Hoax
3. Thanks for the only slightly Intel-biased review (... AnonymouseUser
4. re. the previous comment: Athlon 64 features only... Kai Schmerer
5. re: Dual-Channel Sorry Kai, I was thinking about t... AnonymouseUser
6. Well, gotta say, there might be some hope for ZDNe... Yousuf Khan