Apparently, the lastest CPU Magazine says that the Northwood still kicks some serious butt, performance-wise over Intel's latest .09 micron processor technology in the new Prescott. The article also goes on to say that the power requirement for the new Prescott is now up to 103 watts, which is substantially above the 83 watts required by the Northwood. No wonder why these new Prescott's run so hot! Sure, the bigger L-2 cache is nice but it just might not be worth it given the higher heat issues and lack of performance until new Microsoft Software comes out. An Intel P4 "Northwood" at 3.0C with Hyper-Threading and the 800 MHz front side bus and 512 KB L-2 cache will only run you $227.00 at www.newegg.com http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?description=19-116-156&depa=1
The Prescott will destroy the Norwood. The laws of physics win. Heat can be dissapated with "bigger" fans and bettering case designs. More interesting to me is the new Intel® Extended Memory 64 Technology, or Intel® EM64T CPUs: http://www.intel.com/technology/64bitextensions/FAQ.htm This is clearly a response to the AMD processors. Things are getting more and more interesting by the month. What is astonishing is how fast a company of Intel's size can turn around and meet a challenge from a comptetitor much smaller than it. nitro
I heard that the Intel engineers had already "reverse-engineered" the Intel Xenon processor and future desktop chips so that they could be used for 64 bit computing. Intel's Nocona - - - the first chip to use its own 64-bit extensions, will launch this quarter with the Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology, or "Intel-EM64T" http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1562294,00.asp
Just chose AMD Athlon64. This is a fast and cool (temperature wise) chip. It's also inexpensive. Currently, I use Windows Server 2003(32bit), and weeks ago, I had installed Windows Server 2003 for AMD64. (It's basically same WindowsXP 64bit) I didn't like much. It has 2 InternetExplorers, 32 and 64bit. What I felt there is 64bit-IE behaves faster than 32bit-IE, and the 64bit-IE behaves as fast as the legacy 32bit-IE on the legacy 32bit OS. Generally, with the 64bit OS, the compatibility demerit is more noticeable than the merit of the potential performance improvement. 32bitOS on Athlon64, this is the way to go.
MS has had a 64 bit of windows for a long time. It is just not publicized that much for retail usage http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/64bit/default.mspx
Ah, Thanks for the article. I was wondering how INTC was able to move so fast - good old reverse engineering - LMAO, INTC is giving AMD a taste of it's own medicine. nitro
Ja, From that website: "It is now becoming apparent that neither AMD nor Intel may be able to achieve faster processor speeds with the mature 130 nm production processes. That definitely applies to AMD's AthlonXP, while Intel seems to have more clock speed margin here. Our overclocking project showed that extreme cooling with liquid nitrogen can hoist the Northwood core to exceed 5 GHz. In addition, our 3.4 GHz Northwood sample was capable of easily running more than 4 GHz with an average copper cooler. " nitro