Introduction

Today, Intel is launching a couple new processors. Anand has already taken an in-depth look at the Pentium D 820, so we won't be going into detail on that piece of hardware in this article.

The newest and fastest of the single core parts from Intel is their Pentium 4 670, which runs at 3.8GHz. As this is just a bump in speed from the already available 6xx line of processors, there really isn't anything new to cover architecturally.

Understandably, we aren't incredibly excited about the launch of a simple 5.6% higher clocked chip that will carry a nice price premium without offering many tangible benefits. But don't worry - we will still put the 670 through its paces in our lab. Even if the part is unreasonably priced and not compellingly advanced in its performance characteristics, we will always be interested in understanding and illuminating the hardware landscape.

As this highly clocked part comes to market, we can start to see even more clearly the advantages that dual and multi core will bring. Where a 200MHz clock speed increase used to be huge back in the day of the 1 and 2 GHz processor (a 20% and 10% improvement, respectively), at 4GHz it is not only harder to squeeze the extra speed out of a part, but the return on investment is extremely limited. In order to continue getting the same performance boost from part to part, we would need to see processors launching in 400MHz increments or more to really be worth it.

Dual core has already shown us that it has the ability to deliver performance gains at lower clock speeds that sometimes exceed what we can get from much higher clocked single core parts. We can't ever see a linear increase in performance per core added to a system, but the potential is much higher than a small clock speed increase. That is, until we start adding fewer cores on single silicon than we could MHz. At that point, to see performance gains, technology will need to open another option to us.

The Pentium 4 670 is almost a legacy part at its introduction. It's too expensive, doesn't offer a major performance improvement over other processors, and is single core. So the question we will lead off with is: why should we care?

Let's take a look at the benchmarks and see if they give us a reason to care.

The Test and Business/General Use Performance

The Test

Our hardware configurations are similar to what we've used in previous comparisons.

AMD Athlon 64 Configuration

Socket-939 Athlon 64 CPUs
2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL Dual Channel DIMMs 2-2-2-10
NVIDIA nForce4 Reference Motherboard
ATI Radeon X800 XT PCI Express

Intel Pentium 4 Configuration

LGA-775 Intel Pentium 4 and Extreme Edition CPUs
2 x 512MB Crucial DDR-II 533 Dual Channel DIMMs 3-3-3-12
Intel 925XE and 945G Motherboards
ATI Radeon X800 XT PCI Express

Business/General Use Performance

Business Winstone 2004

Business Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:

. Microsoft Access 2002
. Microsoft Excel 2002
. Microsoft FrontPage 2002
. Microsoft Outlook 2002
. Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
. Microsoft Project 2002
. Microsoft Word 2002
. Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
. WinZip 8.1

Office Productivity SYSMark 2004

SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:

"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."

The next test is Document Creation performance, which shows very little difference in drive performance between the contenders:

"The user edits the document using Word 2002. He transcribes an audio file into a document using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6. Once the document has all the necessary pieces in place, the user changes it into a portable format for easy and secure distribution using Acrobat 5.0.5. The user creates a marketing presentation in PowerPoint 2002 and adds elements to a slide show template."

The final test in our Office Productivity suite is Data Analysis, which BAPCo describes as:

"The user opens a database using Access 2002 and runs some queries. A collection of documents are archived using WinZip 8.1. The queries' results are imported into a spreadsheet using Excel 2002 and are used to generate graphical charts."

Microsoft Office XP SP-2

Here, we see in that the purest of office application tests, performance doesn't vary all too much.

Mozilla 1.4

Quite possibly the most frequently used application on any desktop is the one that we pay the least amount of attention to when it comes to performance. While a bit older than the core that is now used in Firefox, performance in Mozilla is worth looking at as many users are switching from IE to a much more capable browser on the PC - Firefox.

ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0

ACDSee is a popular image editing tool that is great for basic image editing options such as batch resizing, rotating, cropping and other such features that are too elementary to justify purchasing something as powerful as Photoshop. There are no extremely complex filters here, just pure batch image processing.

Ahead Software Nero Express 6.0.0.3

While it was a major issue in the past, buffer underrun errors while burning a CD or DVD are few and far between these days, thanks to high performance CPUs as well as vastly improved optical drives. When you take the optical drive out of the equation, how do these CPU's stack up with burning performance?

Winzip

Archiving performance ends up being fairly CPU bound as well as I/O limited.

Multitasking Content Creation

MCC Winstone 2004

Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:

. Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0.1
. Adobe® Premiere® 6.50
. Macromedia® Director MX 9.0
. Macromedia® Dreamweaver MX 6.1
. Microsoft® Windows MediaTM Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980
. NewTek's LightWave® 3D 7.5b
. SteinbergTM WaveLabTM 4.0f

As you can see above, Lightwave is part of the MCC Winstone 2004 benchmark suite. As an individual application, Lightwave does manage to get a healthy performance benefit with multithreaded rendering enabled, especially when paired with Hyperthreading enabled CPUs like the Pentium 4s here today. All chips were tested with Lightwave set to spawn 4 threads.

ICC SYSMark 2004

The first category that we will deal with is 3D Content Creation. The tests that make up this benchmark are described below:

"The user renders a 3D model to a bitmap using 3ds max 5.1, while preparing web pages in Dreamweaver MX. Then the user renders a 3D animation in a vector graphics format."

Next, we have 2D Content Creation performance:

"The user uses Premiere 6.5 to create a movie from several raw input movie cuts and sound cuts and starts exporting it. While waiting on this operation, the user imports the rendered image into Photoshop 7.01, modifies it and saves the results. Once the movie is assembled, the user edits it and creates special effects using After Effects 5.5."

The Internet Content Creation suite is rounded up with a Web Publishing performance test:

"The user extracts content from an archive using WinZip 8.1. Meanwhile, he uses Flash MX to open the exported 3D vector graphics file. He modifies it by including other pictures and optimizes it for faster animation. The final movie with the special effects is then compressed using Windows Media Encoder 9 series in a format that can be broadcast over broadband Internet. The web site is given the final touches in Dreamweaver MX and the system is scanned by VirusScan 7.0."

Mozilla + Media Encoder

Video Creation/Photo Editing

Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1

Adobe Premier 6.5

Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator 1.5

While Premier is a wonderful professional application, consumers will prefer something a little easier to use. Enter: Roxio's VideoWave Movie Creator, a fairly full-featured, yet consumer level video editing package.

Audio/Video Encoding

MusicMatch Jukebox 7.10

Windows Media Encoder 9

To finish up our look at Video Encoding performance, we have Windows Media Encoder 9 from the WorldBench suit.

Gaming Performance

Doom 3

Unreal Tournament 2004

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

3D Rendering

3dsmax 5.1

WorldBench includes two 3dsmax benchmarks using version 5.1 of the popular 3D rendering and animation package: a DirectX and an OpenGL benchmark.

3dsmax 6

For the next 3dsmax test, we used version 6 of the program and ran the SPECapc rendering tests to truly stress these CPUs. Since there's not much new to report here, we're only going to report the Rendering Composite score.

Workstation Applications

SPECviewperf 8

SPECviewperf is a collection of application traces taken from some of the most popular professional applications, and compiled together in a single set of benchmarks used to estimate performance in the various applications in which the benchmark is used to model. With version 8, SPEC has significantly improved the quality of the benchmark, making it even more of a real world indicator of performance.

We have included SPEC's official description of each one of the 8 tests in the suite.

3dsmax Viewset (3dsmax-03)

"The 3dsmax-03 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by 3ds max 3.1. To insure a common comparison point, the OpenGL plug-in driver from Discreet was used during tracing.

The models for this viewset came from the SPECapc 3ds max 3.1 benchmark. Each model was measured with two different lighting models to reflect a range of potential 3ds max users. The high-complexity model uses five to seven positional lights as defined by the SPECapc benchmark and reflects how a high-end user would work with 3ds max. The medium-complexity lighting models uses two positional lights, a more common lighting environment.

The viewset is based on a trace of the running application and includes all the state changes found during normal 3ds max operation. Immediate-mode OpenGL calls are used to transfer data to the graphics subsystem."

CATIA Viewset (catia-01)

"The catia-01 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the CATIATM V5R12 application from Dassault Systems.

Three models are measured using various modes in CATIA. Phil Harris of LionHeart Solutions, developer of CATBench2003, supplied SPEC/GPC with the models used to measure the CATIA application. The models are courtesy of CATBench2003 and CATIA Community.

The car model contains more than two million points. SPECviewperf replicates the geometry represented by the smaller engine block and submarine models to increase complexity and decrease frame rates. After replication, these models contain 1.2 million vertices (engine block) and 1.8 million vertices (submarine).

State changes as made by the application are included throughout the rendering of the model, including matrix, material, light and line-stipple changes. All state changes are derived from a trace of the running application. The state changes put considerably more stress on graphics subsystems than the simple geometry dumps found in older SPECviewperf viewsets.

Mirroring the application, draw arrays are used for some tests and immediate mode used for others."

Lightscape Viewset (light-07)

"The light-07 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the Lightscape Visualization System from Discreet Logic. Lightscape combines proprietary radiosity algorithms with a physically based lighting interface.

The most significant feature of Lightscape is its ability to accurately simulate global illumination effects by precalculating the diffuse energy distribution in an environment and storing the lighting distribution as part of the 3D model. The resulting lighting "mesh" can then be rapidly displayed."

Maya Viewset (maya-01)

"The maya-01 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the Maya V5 application from Alias.

The models used in the tests were contributed by artists at NVIDIA. Various modes in the Maya application are measured.

State changes as made by the application are included throughout the rendering of the model, including matrix, material, light and line-stipple changes. All state changes are derived from a trace of the running application. The state changes put considerably more stress on graphics subsystems than the simple geometry dumps found in older viewsets.

As in the Maya V5 application, array element is used to transfer data through the OpenGL API."

Pro/ENGINEER (proe-03)

"The proe-03 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the Pro/ENGINEER 2001TM application from PTC.

Two models and three rendering modes are measured during the test. PTC contributed the models to SPEC for use in measurement of the Pro/ENGINEER application. The first of the models, the PTC World Car, represents a large-model workload composed of 3.9 to 5.9 million vertices. This model is measured in shaded, hidden-line removal, and wireframe modes. The wireframe workloads are measured both in normal and antialiased mode. The second model is a copier. It is a medium-sized model made up of 485,000 to 1.6 million vertices. Shaded and hidden-line-removal modes were measured for this model.

This viewset includes state changes as made by the application throughout the rendering of the model, including matrix, material, light and line-stipple changes. The PTC World Car shaded frames include more than 100MB of state and vertex information per frame. All state changes are derived from a trace of the running application. The state changes put considerably more stress on graphics subsystems than the simple geometry dumps found in older viewsets.

Mirroring the application, draw arrays are used for the shaded tests and immediate mode is used for the wireframe. The gradient background used by the Pro/E application is also included to better model the application workload."

SolidWorks Viewset (sw-01)

"The sw-01 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the Solidworks 2004 application from Dassault Systemes.

The model and workloads used were contributed by Solidworks as part of the SPECapc for SolidWorks 2004 benchmark.

State changes as made by the application are included throughout the rendering of the model, including matrix, material, light and line-stipple changes. All state changes are derived from a trace of the running application. The state changes put considerably more stress on graphics subsystems than the simple geometry dumps found in older viewsets.

Mirroring the application, draw arrays are used for some tests and immediate mode used for others."

Unigraphics (ugs-04)

"The ugs-04 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by Unigraphics V17.

The engine model used was taken from the SPECapc for Unigraphics V17 application benchmark. Three rendering modes are measured -- shaded, shaded with transparency, and wireframe. The wireframe workloads are measured both in normal and anti-alised mode. All tests are repeated twice, rotating once in the center of the screen and then moving about the frame to measure clipping performance.

The viewset is based on a trace of the running application and includes all the state changes found during normal Unigraphics operation. As with the application, OpenGL display lists are used to transfer data to the graphics subsystem. Thousands of display lists of varying sizes go into generating each frame of the model.

To increase model size and complexity, SPECviewperf 8.0 replicates the model two times more than the previous ugs-03 test."

Final Words

So, what is the final verdict? There are cases where the 670 performs better than the 570 and cases where it performs worse. It all comes back to the differences between the two processors. Running with the Pentium 4 670, some applications benefit from having more cache, and other suffer due to the higher latency.

To recap, applications that stream data (encoding and rendering) aren't impacted by the cache differences between the 5xx and 6xx series. The two processors perform nearly identically in the tests that we ran in these areas. Games have generally seen a boost from the added cache (we've seen this since the first Extreme Edition), so the 670 has a slight edge over the 570 in that category. Under office and workstation applications, the impact varies from case to case.

The Pentium 4 570 comes in at around $645. In quantities of 1000, the 670 is $850, and the only one listed on pricewatch right now is over $1000. If high single threaded performance is required and the choice comes down to the 570 or 670, we'll have to recommend the cheapest one. Right now, that's the 570.

We do have trouble recommending either of these processors for their price, especially when less expensive options don't degrade performance.

We didn't talk much about the Pentium D 820 today, as Anand covered its performance characteristics in his earlier article on the subject. For those interested in the performance of that part, please check it out. As far as recommendations go, the Pentium D 820 is a compelling solution for those who don't need huge single threaded performance. The choice between great single threaded performance and solid multithreaded performance with Intel's dual core processors will really come down to the usage scenarios that fit each individual.

All in all, we can't say that the Pentium 4 670 adds anything to Intel's line up. As higher performance dual core processors start to come along, we will certainly be more interested in them.