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LOSTCIRCUITS
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| Intel's P4 820D and 670 More Power to Duallies | |
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(Review by MS September 3, 2005) |
| P4-670 |
Final Thoughts
Benchmarks are treacherous. Aside from obvious or less obvious optimizations like in the case of e.g. Abbyy - which we consequently discarded -, benchmarks are becoming poorer and poorer as indicators of real world performance. Benchmarks are easy to run in most cases, at least when it comes to single applications or single threads. Multithreading on the other hand, even though it is supported by essentially every current operating system, can turn into a can of worms, especially since quantitative assesments of the results is somewhat more dificult than in the case of a single application that is timed.
This is where we have some reservations about some of the multithreading approaches, as informative as they may be. The reason is that for example CPU utilization varies within the runtime of most applications, which means that the synchronization of the different workloads - or lack thereof - can change the outcome of the benchmark. Granted that the variations should be relatively minor, they can still alter the results to where they no longer accurately reflect the actual system performance.
Along these lines, the key message of this article is that the processor that came in dead last in most of the benchmarks we showed is, in fact, the best choice amongst the current fleet of Intel's offerings. The advantages of the multicore design are very obvious in any of the 3D rendering applications, the power consumption is borderline acceptable and the gaming performance falls into the same category. For those who were not paying attention, the above refers to the 820 D CPU that retails currently a little higher than $200.-.
On the other hand of Intel's processor gamut is the P4 670, a processor that appears to have been released "because Intel could release it" without very much incentive over any of the other 600 series CPUs. In short, performance is limited by the host bus interface that caps the memory bandwidth at 6.4 GB/sec and a utilization of about 75%. The result is a real bandwidth of 4.9 GB/s under optimized conditions which is in stark contrast to the bandwidth hype woven around DDR2. Let's just face it, without bumping up the host bus interface, it basically doesn't even matter whether the memory bus is running at DDR-333 or DDR2-667 or higher.
On the other hand, increasing the bus frequency is not possible because multipliers lower than 14 x are not supported by the Prescott core and, therefore, a 1066 MHz bus interface would bump the lowest speed to 3.73 HGz and the power consumption to some ungodly 160 W under load for the dual core design. In the case of the 670, the power consumption would stay about the same but there would be no possibility to implement the Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology. On second thought, that one did not seem to work anyway...
Bottomline is that of all current Netburst Architecture processors, the 820 D is the way to go since it offers the most reasonable compromise at a killer price. Those who bought a 925 / 915 chipset ... sorry pal, no go... you got screwed.....
"Drum pruefe, wer sich ewig bindet, ob sich nicht doch was besseres findet" (Thus, who is about to tie the eternal knot, better check whether there ain't anything better coming up).
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Pentium4 820 D (dual core) |
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