Test results

Pity, but we have no gaming section in this article. Socket 775 is a young platform, so it was hard to find a top-end graphics card with the same clock rates and chips in AGP and PCI Express variants. We obtained it late, so we'll have to get back to this in the nearest future.

CPU RightMark 2003

Math solver (physycal model)

As before, AMD64 is unbeatable in this test. If you remember, CPU RightMark now supports all progressive instruction sets and activates SSE2 in math solver on all platforms, and even SSE3 in rendering (for Prescott). Thus AMD fairly wins a "visitor match" over Intel in the SSE2 field. However, Intel's clock rate increase is also noticeable in case of 3.6GHz Pentium 4 Socket 775. The performance boost is 5% proportional to the clock rate growth. So, given no architectural changes are made to Pentium 4, only a 4.1GHz Prescott will achieve results of Athlon 64 3800+ and Athlon 64 FX-53 in CPU RightMark. It's also clear that neither chipset, nor L2 cache affect performance in this test, as all 3.4GHz Pentium 4 processors show similar results.

Rendering module (drawer)

This is just opposite in the rendering module: Intel is a clear leader, with Prescott showing especially good results. It's interesting that this is not the benefit of doubled cache (comparing to Northwood), as the new Pentium 4 eXtreme Edition (actually a Northwood with 2MB L3) shows not a satisfactory result. There's no considerable difference between the same-clock Prescott S478 and S775. Remember that not only chipsets, but memory type is different here. Prescott 3.6 GHz is faster than 3.4 GHz due to good scalability, at least in this application.

RightMark Memory Analyzer 3.2

Minimal and peak latency

We wrote some time ago that due to Hardware Prefetch peculatiries, that seems to be considerably improved in Prescott, a round about a chain in 64-byte strides shows a really interesting picture - tested latency turns out to be lower than minimal possible! But let's demonstrate it again. See for yourself, due to hardware prefetch with 64-byte strides Prescott latency is even smaller than that of AMD64 systems with their memory controller! But if you double the stride, it becomes normal.

There is a way to corner Prescott's Hardware Prefetch. But its improvement is still respectable. Note the serious lag of both older Pentium 4 processors. At that, Prescott in its best form (Socket 478 + usual DDR400) almost catches up with both AMD processors despite not integrated memory controller. On the other hand, Socket 775 doesn't close the gap, even vice versa. Well, it uses DDR2-533 with timings worse than those of DDR400 and a way too narrow bus coupled with asynchronous operation (133MHz actual memory clock rate and 200MHz FSB). Pentium 4 eXtreme Edition has rather high minimal latency. We guess it's the bad performance of L3 cache on a relatively slow 64-bit bus.

Memory read performance

Results of all processors except Northwood-based (which conditionally include Pentium 4 eXtreme Edition though it has Gallatin core) are about the same and lie near theoretical peak bandwidth. We have reasons to "forget" about the bus bandwidth, as DDR2-533 has theoretical peak of 8400 MB/s, but 800MHz FSB of today Pentium 4 just can't support such speed. Northwoods performed rather bad. It seems Prescott's hardware prefetch also touch serial memory access (that is actually logical, because Prefetch is needed here most).

Memory write performance

Test subjects are clearly divided into two groups that witnesses in favour of AMD's integrated controller. At least there's no difference between Intel processors independently on chipset. L2 cache doesn't play a role here as well, because our memory write mode just ginores.

3ds max 5.1 + Brazil r/s

We don't even want to distribute this parity into elements. Such a difference is not in any way impressive to choose a platform on its base.

Lightwave 7.5

A standard situation for this software. AMD loses to Pentium 4 Northwood and is on the level of new Prescotts. 3.6GHz Prescott demonstrates a slight boost comparing to 3.4 GHz. Scalability is visible and even the highest-clock-rate Pentium 4 is not limited by bandwidth.

DivX 5.1.1

It's almost a straight line with a slight outstanding of the new Pentium 4. Just another example of good scalability of Intel processors.

Windows Media Video 9

Prescott feels assured on all its platforms as well as AMD processors. Intel Northwood is not favoured, even with Pentium 4 XE cache. If you remember, we have repeatedly mentioned the effect of Hyper-Threading in Prescott. And this application utilizes this technology very well and provides a good boost.

Mainconcept MPEG Encoder 1.4

Prescott is favoured again. But this time Athlon 64 lags behind - due to good multi-threading implementation again we guess.

Canopus ProCoder

The dispersion is not great. Prescott shows the best results among Intel products, but both Athlon 64 are generally victorious.

LAME and Oggenc encoding

AMD64 mostly competes with Intel Northwood. Prescott lags even at 3.6 GHz, but the scalability is noticeable again.

7-zip 3.13

Again it's about total parity, so let's look a particular details. First, Prescott performed good again. Second, we for the first time see almost zero boost of 3.6 GHz processor compared to 3.4 GHz one. It's early for conclusions, but it seems we managed to find an applicationo to demonstrate unsatisfactory bandwidth (or why clock rate growth doesn't boost performance then?) There's also no benefits of DDR2. But considering recent tests, it's good there no drawbacks at least.

WinRAR 3.20

And as if purposely another archiver turns results upside-down: Northwood performs good, Prescotts perform bad. It's symptomatic that AMD is often a winner in such situations. This time was no exception. Socket 775 generally loses even to Socket 478 seemingly due to high DDR2 latency.

Adobe Photoshop

The most mysterious result of all provided in this article. Neither low-level test above indicated considerable Socket 775 superiority over older platform with the same processors. But nevertheless, this superiority is clearly visible in a real application! Note the difference between Prescott 3.4 GHz on i875P (Socket 478, DDR400) and theoretically the same Prescott 3.4 GHz on i915/i925X (Socket 775, DDR2-533). For now we have to just state it and assume some rather deep changes in Intel's new memory controller that still stay hidden from our sight.

Conclusions

In general, despite new processors and chipsets, we have nothing extraordinary. Yes, there's a new socket. Yes, there are new chipsets along with new memory. But we still think that the situation would hardly change, if Pentium 4 550 and Pentium 4 560 were named just Pentium 4 3.4E GHz and Pentium 4 3.6 GHz and were designed for the good old Socket 478. Some results would be better, some worse maybe (but hardly considerably bad to stress them). The main thing that Intel's new platform demonstrates is vendor's priorities and future plans: noone is going to decline Prescott despite it loses to Northwood sometimes. Especially, considering it wins over Northwood in other situations, and is particularly good with Hyper-Threading. Prescott's drawbacks will seemingly be fixed in a good old way - by clock rate. And the release of 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 should assure everyone who doubts that clock rates will grow. Moreover, we assume that Prescott 3.8 GHz won't be the one to wait for long. At least, it will be strange, if it's not announced this year. Besides, Intel will surely work with software vendors to move as many applications as possible to multi-threading base. It seems in some complex cases, it's the only chance for Prescott to show what it's good for.

However, the main meaning of this announcement is not related to performance or clock rate growth. The meaning is about the arrival of the new platform bound to live at least as much as Socket 478. It's also clear that new socket favourites will be not present, but future processors: Pentium 4 will have to obtain at least 1066MHz FSB to utilize all DDR2-533 potential. The bet on DDR2 is also clear, because Intel declined DDR in the new top-end i925X. Therefore, it's obvious that i915P is a replacement of i865PE, i925X is the new i875P. It's also good that LGA775 platform, according to information that we have, will be compatible with future multi-core processors, so that another considerable bandwidth change won't require a new socket.

To draw a bottom line, we can say that Socket 775 started as optimally as it was possible: on the one hand the company introduced a new higher-clock processor to prove clock rate growth potential. On the other - there's a reserve for the future, so the performance growth is not solely related to CPU clock (remember that 1066MHz FSB). In other words, there's something to be pleased with already today, with more benefits coming up. It's actually a clever step - to introduce a leading platform (among other prorietary products) and then allude to more bonuses in the future. Well, we just have to wait for this future, so let's hope it won't take long.

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