Posted:2002-07-22 By Asboulougia Number of View:9960
PENTIUM 4 2.53GHZ PROCESSOR
REVIEW
By :Asboulougia
Posted:2002-07-22
xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source
We tested the today\'s fastest Pentium 4 processor supporting 2.53GHz core clock frequency and the new533MHz Quad Pumped Bus. Our tests showed that this CPU is the today\'s fastest desktop solution, whichhas beaten its eternal rival, AMD Athlon XP. Find our the details of this victory now!
Table of contents:
Intel\'s Plans in the CPU Market
Intel\'s Plans in the Chipset Market
Testbed
Performance
Office Applications and Data Encoding
3D Games
3D Rendering
Scientific and Professional OpenGL Applications
Conclusion
Some time ago we posted a review of New Intel Pentium 4 2.4B GHz with 533MHz Bus, which was initially supposed to become the top model in the Pentium 4 family until Q3. However, suddenly Intel changed its plans and on May 6 the company announced not only 2.26GHz and 2.4GHz models, but also one more processor for 533Mhz bus: Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz. We were inspired by this fact and decided to devote another article to new Pentium 4 CPUs supporting 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus. This time we are going to focus on Pentium 4 2.53GHz, which is the fastest model in the Pentium 4 family today. At the same time we are going to tell you a bit more about Intel\'s processor plans for the near future.
Intel\'s Plans in the CPU Market
New version of Intel\'s plans, which the company spread among its closest partners underwent thee major changes compared to the previous roadmap:
Pentium 4 2.53GHz was launched earlier;
Pentium 4 1.8GHz based on Northwood and Willamette cores will last a bit longer, until Q4 2002;
In Q4 2002 Intel will launch another pair of i845 chipsets: i845PE and i845GE.
Let\'s get a bit into details now.
Since 0.13micron manufacturing technology used for Pentium 4 processors was optimized on Intel fabs somewhat quicker than the company had initially expected, they decided to speed up the launching of Pentium 4 2.53GHz CPU, which took place on May 6, 2002. This allowed Intel to kill two birds with a stone. First, those of you who are willing to assemble a high-performance system have to start using 533MHz Quad Pumped bus, because Intel has no models working at the same clock frequencies for the slower 400MHz bus. And second, you should never forget about competition with AMD. If Pentium 4 2.4B GHz still gives AMD Athlon XP some hope for victory in some benchmarks, then its faster counterpart working at 2.53GHz should make these chances really small now.
As for the Intel Pentium 4 2.5GHz CPU for 400MHz bus, which was initially supposed to be announced together with Pentium 4 2.53GHz, its due date remained unchanged. Pentium 4 2.5GHz will be officially announced in early Q3.
Also Intel changed slightly the part of its roadmap dealing with the slower Pentium 4 models. If though it looks kind of absurd against the background of the upcoming launching of the new Celeron processors on 0.18micron Willamett-128 core, Intel insists on continuing to manufacture Pentium 4 on 0.18micron Willamette core until the end of the year. In Q2 2002 we will see Pentium 4 (Willamette) 1.7-2GHz; in Q3 we will be able to buy Pentium 4 1.7GHz, 1.8GHz and 1.9GHz, while in Q4 only Pentium 4 1.7GHz and 1.9GHz will remain in the market. The interesting thing about it is that Pentium 4 1.8A GHz based on a new Northwood core will be discontinued in Q3 2002.
As a result, Intel\'s processor roadmap now looks as follows:
Q2 2002
Q3 2002
Q4 2002
Q1 2003
Q2 2003
Pentium 4 (533MHz Quad Pumped Bus)
2.53GHz 2.4B GHz 2.26GHz
2.66GHz
2.8GHz
3.06GHz
>3.06GHz
Pentium 4 (400MHz Quad Pumped Bus)
2.4GHz
2.6GHz 2.5GHz
-
-
-
Celeron (Northwood-256)
-
-
-
2GHz
>2GHz
Celeron (Willamette-128)
1.8GHz 1.7GHz
1.9GHz
-
2GHz
-
Celeron (Tualatin-256)
1.4*GHz
-
-
-
-
* - Some sources claim that Celeron (Tualatin-256) will be shipped in limited quantities.
In addition, I would like to point out the following:
The last Pentium 4 intended for 400MHz Quad Pumped Bus will work at 2.6GHz and will be released in Q3. Later all the CPUs from this family will support only 533MHz bus.
This year Intel will not manage to overcome the 3GHz bar, despite the earlier made announcements of some Intel\'s officials.
Celeron family for Socket370 based on Tualatin core is nearly dead already. The last Celeron processor on this core supporting 1.4GHz core clock frequency was announced in the middle of May and will become the last Intel processor for Socket370 (FCPGA2) systems.
New Celeron processors for Socket478 platforms based on Willamette core featuring smaller 128KB L2 cache and supporting 400MHz Quad Pumped Bus have already been announced. In this quarter we welcomed the models working at 1.7GHz and later on at 1.8GHz.
However, even the relatively new Celeron (Willamette-128) family is going to last not very long. The last model in the family with 2GHz core clock will be launched in Q4 2002.
Starting from next year, Celeron CPUs like their Pentium 4 counterparts will be manufactured with 0.13micron technology. The new budget CPU family will be based on Northwood core with a smaller 256KB L2 cache. At the same time, Celeron (Northwood-256) will still use 400Mhz bus.
Intel\'s Plans in the Chipset Market
The launching of Pentium 4 processors using 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus inspired Intel to introduce several chipsets supporting this bus. They are: i850E, i845E and i845G. i850E is none other but a new revision of a well-known i850 and is intended for dual-channel RDRAM. i845E is a new revision of i845D chipset supporting DDR memory. As for i845G, it is the same i845E but with an integrated graphics core. Also the launching of new Celeron (Willamette-128) influenced Intel\'s decision to introduce a bit later this month a "lite" version of i845G without the external AGP graphics cards support. It was i845GL also working with new 533MHz bus. However, all these chipsets are already familiar to you as they have been covered in great detail in our recent articles called RDRAM vs. DDR SDRAM. New Rivalry: i850E against i845E and i845G and Integrated Graphics for Intel Pentium 4: i845G and i845GL against Competitors.
Nevertheless, we would like to draw your attention to one thing. Although i845E and i845G do support 533Mhz Quad Pumped Bus and 133MHz FSB, they do not have official support for DDR333 memory. At the same time, VIA and SiS have done a real lot to make this memory type start spreading worldwide very rapidly. So, Intel\'s major partners expressed their vital desire to get chipsets supporting faster DDR memory. Intel had to agree that is they had to update their roadmap and to include two new solutions supporting DDR333: i845GE and i845PE. The first one is a newer version of the integrated i845G, and the second one - of a discrete i845E. Both officially support DDR333.
I would also like to stress that i845E and i845G allow setting 166MHz memory bus frequency, which means that theoretically they can work with DDR333 memory. However, Intel hasn\'t yet carried out all stability tests with the new memory type, so they claim no official support of DDR333 by their recently launched chipsets.
By Q4 2002, when i845GE and i845PE come out all the tests should be completed and then Intel\'s chipsets will start working with DDR333 officially. So, no wonder that i845GE and i845PE will remain pin-compatible with i845G and will serious require no PCB design changes from the mainboard manufacturers.
Nevertheless, we wouldn\'t state that i845GE and i845PE will not differ at all from the predecessors. Intel is planning to optimize the DDR memory controller, which may improve the performance a bit. Besides, the graphics core integrated into i845GE will work at a higher frequency. Moreover, the design of i845PE will be very much different from i845E, because Intel will make i845PE pin-compatible with i845G. As a result, Intel will have three groups of pin-to-pin compatible chipsets by the end of the year:
The next chipset for desktop Pentium 4 processors following i845GE and i845PE is scheduled for Q2 2003. This will be a new core logic aka Springdale, which will be much ahead of i845 family. The key features of this solution will be the support of dual-channel DDR333 memory, AGP 8x and support of CPUs working with 667MHz Quad Pumped Bus. This bus is supposed to be implemented in the CPUs based on a new 0.09micron Prescott core due in H2 2003.
As a result, Intel will be offering the following solutions for its Pentium 4 processors within the next 12 months:
i850
i845
i850E
i845E
Launching Date
Launched
Launched
Launched
Launched
Quad Pumped Bus frequency
400MHz
400MHz
533MHz 400MHz
533MHz 400MHz
Max. processor bus bandwidth
3.2GB/sec
3.2GB/sec
4.2GB/sec
4.2GB/sec
Memory
Dual-channel PC800 RDRAM
DDR266 SDRAM PC133 SDRAM
Dual-channel PC800 RDRAM
DDR266 SDRAM
Peak memory bandwidth
3.2GB/sec
2.1GB/sec
3.2GB/sec
2.1GB/sec
AGP
4x
4x
4x
4x
Integrated graphics core
no
no
no
no
South Bridge
ICH2
ICH2
ICH2
ICH4
Bus between the Bridges
Hub Link 1.0
Hub Link 1.0
Hub Link 1.0
Hub Link 1.5
Peak bandwidth of the bus between the bridges
266MB/sec
266MB/sec
266MB/sec
266MB/sec
USB
1.1
1.1
1.1
1.1 2.0
ATA interface
ATA/100
ATA/100
ATA/100
ATA/100
I believe that you hardly have any question left after looking through these tables. So, I suggest passing over to the tests of the today\'s fastest Pentium 4 2.53GHz CPU.
Testbed
Well, the main aim of this test session was to see the performance of the new Pentium 4 2.53GHz CPU with 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus and PC800/PC1066 RDRAM. therefore, we assembled the following testbeds:
All tests were run in Microsoft Windows XP Professional.
I would also like to point out that we wanted to include the results of the overclocked Pentium 4 2.53GHz as well. But later on we had to give up this idea because the processor we had at our disposal appeared hardly overclockable at all. The maximum we managed to squeeze out of it were 138MHz FSB frequency, which made its core clock grow only up to 2.62GHz. So, we had to postpone the overclocking experiments until the launching of the Pentium 4 processors based on new core stepping.
Since the number of tests we carried out this time is much greater than usual, we split the results into several groups depending on the tasks the CPUs were tested in.
We have already analyzed the processor performance in the synthetic test of the memory subsystem in our previous Pentium 4 2.4B GHz Review. So, this time we will pass over right to the real applications.
Performance
Office Applications and Data Encoding
The increase in the core clock frequency of Pentium 4 processor causes a very logical improvement of its performance in SYSmark2002.
The tested systems showed different performance in data processing applications, which depended a lot on the type of applications. As you can see, in mp3 encoding tasks it is the processor core frequency that influences the performance in the first place, and in case of mpeg4 encoding, the influence is also imposed by the memory and processor buses frequencies. The results obtained in WinRAR are even more interesting. The performance in this archiving application appeared very much dependent on the memory subsystem speed.
3D Games
The memory subsystem performance tells a lot on the results of 3DMark2001 SE. Pentium 4 2.4B GHz CPU with PC1066 RDRAM appeared faster than Pentium 4 2.53GHz with PC800 RDRAM.
Theoretically, the CPU performance in contemporary 3D games should depend a lot on the memory subsystem performance. We see clear evidence of that in Quake3 and Comanche 4. At the same time, the performance in Serious Sam 2 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein doesn\'t change very noticeably when we shift from PC800 to PC1066 RDRAM. The higher CPU frequency if of much greater value in these games, as it improves the performance better. Also note that even in Serious Sam 2, where AMD CPUs have always been better than Intel\'s, new Pentium 2.53GHz has finally managed to beat AMD Athlon XP 1.73GHz without even using faster PC1066 RDRAM, which is not so widely spread in the memory market yet.
3D Rendering
We tested the 3D rendering speed in three popular applications: 3ds max 4.26, Maya 4.0.1 and Lightwave 7.0b. In all the tests we timed the scenes rendering speed that is why smaller values on the diagrams correspond to better performance. To test in 3ds max we selected islands scene, for Maya 4.0.1we used Maya-Testcenter rendertest methodology and in Lightwave we used sunset scene.
In rendering applications the most important thing is the FPU and SSE2 performance, if the application is optimized for Intel instructions. That is why the processor working frequency is more important in these applications than anything else. I would like to draw your attention to very high results shown by Athlon XP in Lightwave test, which may look pretty strange against the background of the results obtained by other testers using this application. The matter is that sunset scene used to test the performance is not included into those recommended by Intel. We selected this particular benchmark on purpose, because the performance of Pentium 4 in the scenes recommended by Intel is usually much higher than that of AMD Athlon XP. However, in the future we are planning to add more tests to our set, so that you get the change to check Intel\'s vision of the performance in Lightwave a swell.
Scientific and Professional OpenGL Applications
Despite very high working frequency of the fastest Pentium 4 CPU, its arithmetic unit proved to be slower than that of Athlon XP 2100+. So, in some professional benchmarks Athlon XP 2100+ appeared faster than the new Pentium 4. In particular, Athlon XP outperformed Pentium 4 in Science Mark, Awadvs-04 and DX-06. In DRV-07, Light-04 and MedMCAD-01 the leadership goes back to Intel due to very high bandwidth of the processor-to-memory bus.
Conclusion
The today\'s conclusion will be pretty short. Disregarding a few applications using FPU very actively, we have to admit that Intel is offering the fastest desktop processors today. So, against the background of Athlon XP family, fastest Pentium 4 models have only two disadvantages. The first one is weak FPU unit, which makes the performance of Pentium 4 CPUs slower than the performance of rivalry products from AMD in those applications, which do not use SSE2 instructions that actively. And the second drawback is very high price. Today Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz costs twice as much as AMD Athlon XP 2100+.
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