The Pentium 4 is here. Intel’s glittering P4 launch in New
Delhi’s Park Royal was the first one in the world, thanks partly to Delhi
being a half-day ahead of the US time zones. The multimedia apps demos were
impressive: streaming media, audio and video editing at blazing speeds. But as
usual, the real world is far removed from the demo floor.
The P4 does not do much to standard office apps like Word or
Excel. So it’s unlikely that businesses will be flocking to pick up the new
machines (expected to cost well over Rs 1 lakh in India) in a hurry. What it
does do is speed up multimedia: MP3 encoding, streaming media, et al. are 25 to
50% faster. Coupled with its pricetag, and the fact that it only supports the
more expensive Rambus memory as of now, P4 sales may not overtake PIII sales
until well into 2001.
The P4 is a new chip: with a new micro-architecture, unlike
the PIII which simply extended the PII. The new "NetBurst"
architecture uses a 400 MHz system bus, tripling data speed (compared to the
PIII’s 133 MHz system bus). "Advanced dynamic execution" processes
data more efficiently, such as by recognizing parallel patterns and priorities.
Other key features include:
-
A rapid execution
engine which runs at twice the speed of the processor and handles frequent
tasks such as addition and subtraction -
Execution trace
cache, a memory area to store and transfer data for high-speed processing -
144 new
instructions to improve multimedia performance.
The launch period wasn’t without glitches: early-shipment
chips contained incorrect code, though this was fixed before the chips reached
consumers, according to Intel, through updated BIOS code sent to PC makers.
(Earlier this year, Intel had to recall defective 1.13 GHz PIII chips and some
circuit boards.)
Testers haven’t been enthusiastic in their reports, saying
that the P4 is not working much faster than PIII or AMD Athlon chips, and in
some cases it’s slower than both. How can a P4 be slower than a PIII? One
reason could be the P4’s 20-stage pipeline, twice as long as the PIII’s and
bigger than the Athlon’s 15-stage pipeline. This means data has to travel
through more stages, and more time is lost if there are errors. So why a long
pipeline? Largely for the future: it allows faster clock speeds, and once
software recompiled for the P4 ships, it can work more efficiently. But today’s
standard software won’t be running much faster on the P4.
Gaming and media sites have reported faster performance with
media apps, with the Quake III genre of high-power games, and with
floating-point intensive scientific calculations. For most real apps, the P4’s
no better than the PIII. "It’s slower than the competition in just about
every area," says Anand Lal Shimpi, who runs the review site anandtech.com.
The P4 is shipping with 1.4 GHz (about $820 in quantities of 1,000) and 1.5
GHz clocks, expected to go to 2 GHz in a year. Intel continues with the Pentium
III and Celeron chips too–for the desktop, but more so for the mobile, which
will not get P4 chips for at least a year. DQ