Performance

As has been found with previous Pentium 4 processor releases, assessing performance is not quite as straightforward as is with the AMD Athlon or Pentium III. This is mainly due to the design goals (and compromises) set out by the engineers at Intel. There have been a number of Pentium 4 benchmarks at sites such as:

• Ace's Hardware
  
  
• Anandtech

Overall the addition of an extra 256 KB Level 2 cache to the Pentium 4 has given the chip a performance boost in a number of areas. In many gaming and professional benchmarks the new Pentium 4 (A) has closed the performance gap which existed between it and the AMD Athlon XP. In many professional 3D graphics and workstation applications the Pentium 4 (A) is a match for its lower clocked AMD counterpart.

In many multi-tasking application benchmarks the Pentium 4 (A) also manages to post impressive results mostly due to the impressive memory bandwidth afforded to it by the new 512 KB Level 2 cache and DDR chipsets such as the i845D and VIA P4X266A.

An area where the Pentium 4 (A) takes a clear lead over its AMD counterpart is in applications which make use of Intel’s new SSE2 instruction set. Any benchmark using Adobe Photoshop always manages to yield impressive results for the Pentium 4 due to it being highly optimised for SSE2. Currently the AMD Athlon XP does not feature the SSE2 instruction support and is an area where the Pentium 4 has an advantage.

Interestingly any game which makes heavy use of x87 Floating Point Instructions are a noticable weak point for the new Pentium 4 (A). Effectively x87 is the achilles heel of the Pentium 4. In applications which require heavy x87 usage, such as POV-RAY, or Unreal Tournament the Pentium 4 will have difficulty competing with chips such as the AMD Athlon. In this area the lower clocked Athlon XP still has a distinct advantage over its rival.

Conclusion

Overall the new 0.13 micron Pentium 4 (A) shows a noticeable performance increase for Intel’s Pentium 4 family. This is mostly due to its larger 512 KB Level 2 cache combined with an increase in clock speed to 2.2 Ghz. Intel’s move to a 0.13 micron process with copper interconnects is also an impressive achievement.

At the time of launch the Pentium 4 (A) only manages parity and in some areas a slight increase in performance over the lower clocked AMD Athlon XP. Couple this to the lower cost of the AMD Athlon XP the new Pentium 4 (A) struggles to be competative. How long this will last may well be open to question as the 2.2 GHz “Northwood” is only the first in a range of new Pentium 4 chips which will scale to speeds of 3 GHz in the coming months.

So far the 2.2 Ghz Pentium 4 has had a somewhat mixed reception from PC hardware review sites, with many reviewers being unable to reach a distinct conclusion as to whether it is better (or even an equal to) the Athlon XP. In our opinion the 2.2 GHz is only the start of the new Pentium 4 range, and it may well prove to be an effective performer as clock speeds rise.

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