UT2003, Q3, Call Of Duty
Our custom Unreal Tournament test uses the Sun Temple level as a backdrop for some bot action. The characteristics of the timedemo ensure that it's more bound by the subsystem than the graphics card. Prescott is close to the regular Northwood here, but that's not what most enthusiasts want to hear. They expected superior performance in every department. We now know that won't be the case. Exemplary performance by the EE chips and Athlon 64s again.
The Quake III graph echoes UT2003's. We feel the Prescott absolutely needed a beefy on-chip cache count. Without it, we reckon, its performance would be dire enough for even die-hard Intel supporters to ditch Intel supposedly latest and greatest consumer-level CPU. The 3.4GHz Northwood will always be faster than the incumbent 3.2GHz model. EE chips just love loading up portions of Quake III into their fat cache stores.
The sample Prescott had winged its way back to Intel towers by the time COD was added. Looking at the similar Q3's performance, we reckon that it would benchmark just below the regular 3.2GHz Northwood's levels. The various Pentium 4s do well enough here. Athlon 64 3200+ and 3400+s are none too shabby.
Hyper-Threading improvements ??
Intel likes to push the Prescott's improved Hyper-Threading instructions. However, an examination of the MONITOR and MWAIT additions shows that a program recompilation is required for them to become effective. We're adamant that will be the case, but present Hyper-Threading improvements won't be derived from them. Present gains can be attributed to the Prescott's 16kb L1 data and 1MB L2 cache stores. Having more data on chip naturally keeps the execution units busier. So whilst it might appear that there's a whole new technology that's aiding HT work, the more mundane truth lies with improved data access.
Quake III was re-run at the standard benchmark settings shown above. This time, though, a copy of SETI was launched in the background to give the HT technology a workout. The Prescott is faster than the Northwood, but we feel that has little to do with anything other than cache enhancement.
