[NEWS] - Prescott arrives on February 2nd.

[CougTek]

Monday, the 2nd of February will be a big day for Intel, as the company unveils 7 new desktop microprocessors on that date. The list includes 4 Prescott processors with 1MB of L2 cache, 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, SSE3, HT technology, running at 3.40GHz, 3.20GHz, 3.00GHz and 2.80GHz; Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor at 3.40GHz with 2MB cache, 800MHz QPB and HT technology; Intel Pentium 4 Northwood with 512KB cache at 3.40GHz; Intel Pentium 4 2.80A processor with 533MHz PSB, 1MB of cache, SSE3, based on Prescott core, but without HT technology.

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Initial Prescott processors will come in 478-pin packaging, but, at least, some of them will not be compatible with current Socket 478 mainboards. In the second quarter next year Intel will bring processors and mainboards featuring LGA775 packaging.

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According to some sources, Intel’s Prescott design does have 64-bit extensions in addition to improvements in Hyper-Threading implementation and SSE3 realization. These extensions are not compatible with AMD64 technology and will not be enabled in first Prescott chips. Moreover, some say Intel is not likely to turn on additional functionality of the Prescott processor until 2005, probably when AMD’s 64-bit processors become more or less wide-spread on the market and may affect Intel’s sales.

Athlon 64 still seems more appealing to me. But AMD will have to introduce cheaper versions of the Athlon 64 in order to compete against Intel in the lower end by February.

News source

 

[LunarMist]

What does that mean to the current Pentium 4 user? Are the new Prescott chips compatible with current i875 boards? Are they faster at the given clockspeed or is the extra L2 cache mostly hype?

 

[CougTek]

We can only speculate on this until we can get the final product, Lunar. By the reports given by OEMs with sample units, a 3.2gagahertz Prescott should be between the vanilla P4 3.2GHz and the P4 3.2GHz Extreme Edition. I presume this means we can expect that at the same frequency, Prescott will be 5% to 10% faster than Northwood, depending on the application.

Further details about compatibility should surface in the beginning of next year.