Prescott reviews

[Piccoro]

Didn't know if anyone would be interested but here are some Prescott reviews.
Tom's Hardware
Xbitlabs

[Cobra]

Mmmmmm... 1MB of L2 cache. Nice!

But, I wonder, when will Intel be forced to ditch the high clock speeds and go back the way Apple (or IBM, since they make the chips) and AMD are going - lower clock speeds and more processing for each cycle? Also, when will Intel launch a really mainstream 64-bit chip? It'd be nice to have some real competition to drive the 64-bit market a bit.

Nevertheless, I would love to have one of those chips. Imagine how fast you could encode video on those!

CobraDMX

[Sulik]

The currently available prescotts aren't very good compared to Northwood, even for video encoding, mostly because of the slower internal caches.
However, it is amazing that they were able to keep these performance levels while increasing the pipeline to 31 stages. Prescott will rock once it hits 4+GHz.

There are many rumors around that Prescott already supports 64-bit and even dual cores (check out theinquirer.net and x86-secret.com) internally, but it has been disabled in the current versions (same as hyperthreading on the original P4).

[Piccoro]

IMO
Prescott is only here to bridge the gap to tejas from the northwood core.
It does run hotter but yet can allow for clocking higher. I've heard of these chips coming in around 60C for tempurature.

With out the improvements made in prescott (16KB L1 cache up from 8KB, 1MB L2 cache up from 512KB, improved branch prediction, slightly improved HT) it would have been a really sad chip.
20 stages up to 31 really hurts and is only there so they can increase the clock speed and actually make it to 4ghz.
The problems with Prescott are not with 90nm proccess but are with something else within Prescott's design. If the branch prediction misses it has to wait 11 more cycles (than Northwood) and then try again.

Specview is about the only thing that stood out that liked prescott. The rest is better off with a good old Northwood 800FSB core.

The 64bit said to be hidden/disabled in Prescott is not compatible yet w/the AMD64 extentions. They are still playing with that and if they do enable them, they will do so in Tejas. That doesn't give them Hypertransport and onboard memory controller though.
Also if they were to enabled those 64bit extentions...I wonder how much heat that would increase Prescott to. BTX is really needed before they get to high on the ghz ladder.