P4 Extreme Delivers Healthy Performance
The chip giant sees Pentium 4 Extreme finding its way into the high-end gaming and computing power-user communities,coincidentally, markets that rival Advanced Micro Devices also is targeting with its 64-bit Opteron processor, released just a week later.
Pentium 4 Extreme's big selling point is that it incorporates Intel's Hyper-Threading technology with an extra 2 Mbytes of L3 cache. As a result, Intel claims the Pentium 4 Extreme is faster across the board than the regular 512K Pentium 4 version.
To check the integrity of the Pentium 4 Extreme, the CRN Test Center benchmarked a 3.2GHz model of the new processor against a standard Pentium 4 2.8GHz processor.
Though Intel hasn't disclosed pricing yet for the 3.2GHz Pentium 4 Extreme, the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 costs $278 (800MHz bus speed with hyperthreading technology) or $262 (533MHz bus speed) in 1,000-unit quantities.
Both processors were benchmarked using the PassMark PerformanceTest 4.0 tool from PassMark Software (www.passmark.com). PassMark PerformanceTest allows users to quickly assess the performance of a computer and then compare it to a number of standard baseline computer systems. The higher the number, the better the performance. The 3.2GHz Pentium 4 Extreme scored a 114.9, while the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 scored a 100.7.
The Pentium 4 Extreme outperformed its counterpart in most of the PassMark tool's testing categories, as one would expect given Extreme's larger cache. The new Pentium 4 boosts the total on-chip cache memory to 2 Mbytes, enhancing performance. Applications that manipulate large files, such as Adobe Photoshop and audio/video editing software, likely will benefit most from the cache increase.
To run the software used in the test, engineers built two identical systems, save for the processors. The systems ran Windows XP and contained the Canterwood D875PBZ i875P-based motherboard, 1 Gbyte of PC3700 DDRSDRAM, an Nvidia GeForce4 TI 4200 128-Mbyte 8X AGP video card, an Adaptec 29160 Ultra160 SCSI controller and an 18.2-Gbyte Compaq hard drive.
Gaming performance has emerged as a major selling point for solution providers in the home integration space. So Test Center engineers used EA Games' "The Need for Speed" to gauge the Pentium 4 Extreme and found that the processor's performance was even healthier when it came to playing a video game. Pentium 4 Extreme offered no latency or graphics issues at any point during the gaming session.
That said, Intel hopes Pentium 4 Extreme will serve as a stepping stone in delivering a true "digital home" experience.