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Pentium 4 with 2.4 GHz in the test: The new front runner

Pentium 4 with 2.4 GHz in the test: The new front runner

Preface

Only recently did we have the latest processors from AMD and Intel compared. Suitable for 2.4. Intel has now introduced the Pentium 4 with 2.4 GHz and is thus taking another important step towards 3.0 GHz. Like its two predecessors, the new Pentium 4 is still based on the Northwood core, which is manufactured in 0.13 µm. In particular, the L2 cache, which has been doubled to 512kb, has given the Northwood Pentium4 series a good performance boost compared to the old series with Willamette core. The Intel Pentium 4 2.2 GHz and the AMD Athlon XP 2000+ have fought a hot duel from then on. Sometimes the Intel processor was clearly ahead, sometimes its rival from AMD. To what extent the Pentium 4 with 2.4 GHz now for preliminary clarity in the battle for the fastest processorwe will take a closer look at the following pages.

Pentium4 2.4
Pentium4 2.4 subpage

Technology

Since nothing has changed on the new Pentium 4 with 2.4 GHz apart from a higher clock, we will only briefly summarize the technical details of the Northwood, as we have already dealt extensively with this topic in the processor comparison AMD vs. Intel . A table comparison should not be missing here either.

Features Pentium 4 (old) Pentium 4 (new) Athlon XP core Willamette Northwood Palomino manufacture 0.18 µm 0.13 µm 0.18 µm base 423 478 SockelA clock rate 1300-2000MHz 1600-2400MHz 1333-1733 MHz transistors 42 million 55 million 37.5 million DIE-Size 217 mm2 146 mm2 128 mm2 Front-Side-Bus 100 MHz/400 MHz QDR 100 MHz/400 MHz QDR 133 MHz/266 MHz DDR L1 execution cache 12,000 µ-ops (trace cache) 12,000 µ-ops (trace cache) 64 KB L1 data cache 8 KB 8 KB 64 KB L1 clock CPU clock CPU clock CPU clock L2 -Cache 256KB 512 KB 256KB L2 bandwidth 256 bit 256 bit 64 bit L2 cache clock CPU clock CPU clock CPU clock Hardware data prefetching Yes Yes Yes VCore 1.75 volt 1.5 volt 1.75 volt instruction sets MMX SSE/SSE2 MMX SSE/SSE2 MMX/3DNow! 3DNow! +/SSE temperature diode yes yes yes (not yet fully developed) multiprocessor-capable no no noMemory types SDRAM, DDR-SDRAMRDRAM SDRAM, DDR-SDRAMRDRAM SDRAM, DDR-SDRAM CPU architecture 20-stage pipeline 20-stage pipeline 15-stage (FPU) 10-stage (ALU) pipeline

The Pentium 4 with 2.4 GHz is a classic representative of the Northwood core. Nothing has changed compared to the models that are already available in terms of the required core voltage and the front-side bus. Incidentally, due to the popularity of the Pentium4 2.0A with a Northwood core, Intel has stopped manufacturing the classic Pentium4 2.0 with a Willamette core. A completely logical step, as the advantages of the new model are simply obvious. The customer receives a faster processor with twice the size of the L2 cache for almost the same price, which also radiates significantly less heat and thus requires less cooling.

Nevertheless, Willamette and Northwood are not fundamentally different in their architecture each other. For both processors, Intel relies on the Netburst architecture, which was specially designed for high clock rates and which will also be used in the successor to the Northwood. But more on that later. The Netburst architecture can be summarized with six catchwords:

Since all of these points were discussed extensively in the last processor comparison, we do not want to go on here go into more detail.

If you put the table together, it becomes quite clear that Intel's Pentium 4 is technologically and technically a lot ahead of the Athlon XP, at least on paper. That this is by no means a disadvantage for theAMD processor has already been shown in the last article. We'll see later how the new Pentium 4 performs this time.

On the next page: Power consumption

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