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LOSTCIRCUITS
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| Intel Pentium4 840 Extreme Edition and 840D .... the name of the rose ... | |
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(Review by MS June 20, 2005) |
| AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (Venice) |
Final Thoughts
It is this time of the day again where a review needs to be wrapped up. As mentioned in the Introduction, benchmarks are not always what it is all about. There is, especially with dual processor systems, that certain goodness that is hard to describe but which can certainly get you hooked on duallies. The 840 core fits right into that description, regardless of whether it is the standard "D" edition or the Extreme Edition.
On the less bright side of things is the somewhat sobering insight about the possibilities of running multiple threads simultaneously without too much interference. Provided that the multitasking components are carefully chosen, this will work, however, especially those applications that are multithreaded and, therefore, thrive on SMP or SMT, mitigate the multitasking sweetness in that they ruthlessly hog up whatever resources they can arbitrate for. This creates a rather interesting paradox: applications that are not multithreaded are leveraged against each other on the level of the OS. Applications that can actually take advantage of SMT / SMP cause havoc with respect to the overall execution of needful things.
This leaves the user with two choices: carefully avoid any multithreaded software because it may interfere with the multiprocessor goodness and leave most of the system resources unused for most of the time. Or take advantage of thread level parallelism or whatever buzzword is used to describe SMP execution of multiple threads within the same application but bite the bullet when it comes down to execution of multiple of those applications in parallel. Bottomline is that things are not as simple as they are projected.
Finally, there is the issue of power consumption. Seeing the power figures that we generated, it is no longer surprising that even for normal operation, four 12V lines dedicated to delivering power to the CPU are necessary. Because of the electrical specifications, each line can deliver 5A, which, in the case of 12V, amounts to 60W. Two lines, therefore, as found in a standard 4 pin auxiliary connector would be highly insufficient, since they could only deliver 120W, whereas, as we showed, the total power draw of the CPU can easily exceed 145W.
Keep in mind here that the power data refer to the input power going into the MOSFETs of the VRM, which adds a bit of overhead to the actual CPU power. That means that in case we are measuring e.g. 145W, a hypothetical efficacy of 95% of the VRM would put the CPU at 137.8W. That is still enough.
It is somewhat difficult to come to a conclusion about the actual usefulness of the dual core in its present form. There is definitely the high-end 3D Rendering community that will wholeheartedly embrace the kind of horse power delivered by the dual core family, on the other hand, as we showed, it may be worthwhile in the one or other task to try running with or without HyperThreading, since dual core plus HT can incur a 100% performance penalty.
There is the community of archivists that are hunched all day over ancient manuscripts, trying to extract the text into text files of one or the other format. For those - and as long as they use Abbyy FineReader - the P4 840 EE appears a godsent, there is currently no other processor that handles OCR as well as the dual core ExtremeEdition: "... the name of the rose ... ".
For most mere mortals, the 800 series, at least at this point, appears a push in the right direction but at the same time, it is overkill and mitigates many of the latest improvements Intel has come up with as e.g. the Enhanced Intel Speedstep Technology or in general the power-saving features. In general, just keeping the 840 EE running will noticeably warm up the room - but that also incurs operating costs. All in all, I am personally waiting for the dual core Pentium M.
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Pentium 4 840D (dual core) |
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