Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/977
Intel's Pentium 4 2.80GHz - Moving to the Head of the Class
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 26, 2002 4:51 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
We were originally only scheduled to have one major CPU review this month, a review of Intel's Pentium 4 clocked at 2.80GHz. At the last minute, just around a week before Intel was going to introduce the new stepping of their Pentium 4 processor along with four new clock speeds, AMD decided to launch their Athlon XP 2600+.
As you'll remember from our review of the Athlon XP 2600+, AMD introduced a new revision of their 0.13-micron Thoroughbred core aptly named Revision B. This new revision not only allowed for much higher clock speeds, but also restored competition to AMD's Athlon XP line when it needed it most. The only real fault with AMD's Athlon XP 2600+ was that in the competitive spirit, AMD pulled the trigger a bit too early, effectively paper-launching the XP 2600+ at least a month before retail availability. We expected more from the company that delivered countless times when Intel was pulling the same sort of "launch now, deliver later" tactics.
With today's launch of the Pentium 4 at 2.80GHz, Intel is not only turning up the clock speed dial once again but they are also introducing a number of intermediate solutions all built on a brand new stepping of the Pentium 4's Northwood core.
Before we get into analyzing exactly what's new about this core, let's take a look at what's being announced today. In order to meet the demands of OEMs that still have a large supply of 400MHz FSB systems, Intel is announcing new CPUs that still run off of the "old" 400MHz FSB as well as the new 533MHz FSB:
Pentium 4 2.80GHz (2800/533MHz FSB)
Pentium 4 2.66GHz (2666/533MHz FSB)
Pentium 4 2.60GHz (2600/400MHz FSB)
Pentium 4 2.50GHz (2500/400MHz FSB)
In the usual Intel style, if you want to get the fastest CPUs you'll have to upgrade to the newer 533MHz FSB platforms.
A New Core Stepping
It seems to be all the rage to tweak CPU cores these days; AMD just revamped their Thoroughbred core by adding an additional metal layer and with the latest Pentium 4, Intel has modified the Northwood core a bit as well.
(Left to Right) New Northwood stepping, Original Northwood, AMD's Thoroughbred-B
(Left to Right) AMD's Thoroughbred-B, Original Northwood, New Northwood stepping
(note the larger power delivery capacitors on the new Northwood)
Update:Intel has informed us that there has been no increase in TLB size on the new core. The new core does have some changes that offer increased performance but they are not related to the L1 TLB size as we originally reported. WCPUID incorrectly reports an increase in TLB size on the new stepping of the core. The performance improvement yielded by the new core will be relatively unnoticeable to most desktop users; we ran benchmarks comparing the two cores at 2.0GHz and only saw a 2% performance improvement on average.
The new stepping isn't nearly as compelling as AMD's Thoroughbred Revision B, so don't be too upset if you don't end up with the new core. Obviously if you purchase any of the four new CPUs then you'll be running the new stepping in any case.
The rest of the characteristics of the CPUs remain unchanged; we've already discussed the Pentium 4's architecture in great detail in previous reviews, so be sure to read them first if you're not familiar with the CPU.
The new 2.80GHz processor does run at a slightly higher core voltage than its predecessor (1.525V vs. 1.500V), which was necessary to hit the higher clock speed while passing Intel's validation requirements. Nothing more than a BIOS update should be required to support the new CPUs on current Socket-478 motherboards.
The Test
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Windows
XP Professional Test Bed
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Hardware
Configuration
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| CPU |
AMD
Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz)
AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.00GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.60GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.50GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.40B GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.20GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz |
| Motherboard |
EPoX
8K3A+ - VIA KT333 Chipset
Intel D850EMV2 - Intel 850E Chipset |
| RAM |
1
x 256MB DDR333 CAS2 Corsair XMS3000 DIMM
2 x 128MB PC800 Samsung RIMMs |
| Sound |
None
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| Hard Drive |
80GB
Western Digital Special Edition 8MB Cache ATA/100 HDD
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| Video Cards (Drivers) |
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 (30.82) |
Content Creation Performance
We're still delving deeper into the performance issues behind SYSMark 2002 but in the meantime we will continue to provide performance numbers from the benchmark. Keep in mind that the real-world tasks SYSMark 2002 runs are known to be noticeably faster on the Pentium 4 platform which is why even the fastest Athlon XP cannot reach the performance of a 2GHz Pentium 4.
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370
356
262Content Creation Winstone 2002 is another Content Creation benchmark that focuses on performance under applications like Adobe Photoshop, Premier and Macromedia Dreamweaver. This benchmark is much more I/O bound than its SYSMark 2002 counterpart, although the results are very similar:
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General Usage & Business Application Performance
For general/business usage performance we turn to Office Productivity SYSMark 2002 and Business Winstone 2001:
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| General
Usage Performance Business Winstone 2001 |
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The Athlon XP is much more competitive under Business Winstone 2001, thanks to a much smaller working dataset that fits better within its L2 cache. The 2.80GHz Pentium 4 commands a lead here but not a strong one as most basic business tasks are not very CPU limited to begin with.
3D Rendering Performance - 3ds max 5
When the Athlon was first released 3 years ago, 3D Studio MAX was a strongpoint of its performance. The Athlon's raw FPU performance was right up 3dsmax's ally and thus it put Intel's competing solutions (at the time, the Pentium III) to shame. Things have changed a bit, the latest version of 3ds max (R5) does have some Pentium 4 optimizations that keep things quite competitive between the Athlon XP and the Pentium 4.
For our 3ds max 5 benchmarks we chose two benchmark scenes that ship with the product - SinglePipe2.max and Underwater_Environment_Finished.max
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When the Pentium 4 specific optimizations are able to come into play, AMD's 2600+ can offer similar performance to its namesake; in situations where those specific optimizations aren't present however, the 2600+ can offer equal performance to the 2.80GHz newcomer.
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75The Athlon XP has always had a strong showing under Maya and the trend continues here, even the lightening fast Pentium 4 2.80 falls behind.
3D Rendering Performance using SSE2
While 3ds max 5 is SSE2 optimized, the level of optimization is nowhere near what NewTek reported with Lightwave upon releasing version 7.0b. The performance improvements offered by the new SSE2 optimized version were all above 20% using NewTek's supplied benchmarking scenes.
We chose two benchmarks to use, the least SSE2 optimized one and another that is more optimized just to get an idea of the potential that lies for Pentium 4 users running heavily optimized applications
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In both tests the 2.80GHz Pentium 4 does some serious damage; we also see that in most 3D rendering applications there's not much of a benefit seen from moving to the 533MHz FSB because of the relatively small size of the working dataset.
Media Encoding Performance
What was once reserved for "professional" use only has now become a task for many home PCs - media encoding. Today's media encoding requirements are more demanding than ever and are still some of the most intensive procedures you can run on your PC.
We'll start off with a "quick" conversion of a DVD rip (more specifically, Chapter 40 from the Star Wars Episode I DVD) to a DiVX MPEG-4 file. We used the latest DiVX codec (5.02) in conjunction with Xmpeg 4.5 to perform the encoding.
We set the encoding speed to Fastest, disabled audio processing and left all of the remaining settings on their defaults. We recorded the last frame rate given during the encoding process as the progress bar hit 100%.
| MPEG-4
Encoding Performance - Xmpeg 4.5/DiVX 5.02 Conversion Frame Rate (higher is better) |
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Even at lower clock speeds, the Pentium 4 benefits greatly from its 533MHz FSB in the MPEG-4 conversion test; a very bandwidth intensive test, it's no wonder the Pentium 4 does quite well here.
MP3 audio encoding is another great CPU test, although this sort of an application is much less platform intensive than the MPEG-4 test from above. Raw computational power is mostly stressed in the following MP3 encoding test; we encoded a 170MB wav file into a VBR (Variable Bit Rate) MP3 using the highest quality settings (-V 0) allowed by the LAME 3.91 MP3 encoder.
| MP3
Encoding Performance - LAME 3.91 Time in Seconds to Encode 170MB .wav File |
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The situation is a bit different when you look at MP3 encoding; this is definitely not as bandwidth-strenuous of a task as MPEG-4 encoding and thus we see a heated battle between the Athlon XP 2600+ and the Pentium 4 2.80GHz; there's also little benefit of going with a 533MHz FSB part in this case.
Gaming Performance - Unreal Tournament 2003
We introduced the latest Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark in our GPU Shootout article a few weeks back and we're continuing to use it as an example of a next-generation game test.
We benchmarked only under one level - DM-Asbestos (a very CPU bound benchmark) as our other UT2003 benchmark did not vary with CPU speed on any of the 2GHz+ CPUs (DM-Antalus is GPU limited in most situations unless you have a Radeon 9700 Pro at your disposal).
| Gaming
Performance - Unreal Tournament 2003 DM-Asbestos - Frames per Second (higher is better) |
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3D games are known bandwidth hogs and thus we can see that the new 400MHz parts have a difficult time keeping up with their 533MHz counterparts. As expected, the new 2.80GHz Pentium 4 takes the crown under Unreal Tournament 2003.
Gaming Performance (continued)
Jedi Knight 2 is another great gaming benchmark for CPUs as it is based on the popular Quake III engine but is demanding enough that it doesn't break the 300fps barrier at every chance it gets.
We used the 1.03 patch which still retained the game's built in demo (JK2FFA) and ran the test at high detail settings with anisotropic filtering disabled.
| Gaming
Performance - Jedi Knight 2 1.03 JK2FFA - Frames per Second (higher is better) |
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The trend continues under Jedi Knight 2 with the Pentium 4 line taking the top performing positions.
| Gaming
Performance - Serious Sam 2 Little Trouble - Frames per Second (higher is better) |
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In situations where the burden isn't on the CPU's shoulders, you won't see any performance difference between these contenders.
| Gaming
Performance - Comanche 4 Benchmark - Frames per Second (higher is better) |
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The Pentium 4 2.80 weighs in at 15% faster than the Athlon XP 2600+ in the Comanche 4 test, which is quite an impressive lead over a processor that is already very fast.
Final Words
We knew exactly how fast the 2.80GHz Pentium 4 was when we wrote about the Athlon XP 2600+ last week, but it was a matter of timing that kept us from commenting on it. As Intel regains the performance crown, some very interesting things begin to happen; for starters, now the 2.53GHz Pentium 4 drops to an affordable sub-$300 level to make room for the new 2.6GHz and 2.80GHz parts. This is obviously highly competitive with AMD's Athlon XP 2600+ although once you get into the lower price ranges the Athlon XP offers a much better value for your money.
The new 400MHz FSB parts should be good overclockers as they have low enough multipliers to be advantageous. We had no problem taking all of our CPUs based on the new core steppings up to the 3GHz mark and although your mileage may vary we weren't trying very hard and got great results while simply using stock (retail) cooling on the Pentium 4. If you're not planning on overclocking however, the 400MHz FSB parts should only be reserved for nonperformance oriented applications as their performance is noticeably less than the newer 533MHz FSB CPUs.
With the release of their 2.80GHz processor out of the way, Intel has now set the stage for a number of other exciting announcements at their forthcoming Developer Forum in two weeks. Only time will tell what we'll see there, but you better believe we'll be there covering it for you.
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