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Written by Tuan "Solace" Nguyen
Saturday, December 09, 2000
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Page 8 of 8 Analysis
Right now there is a split in the Pentium 4’s performance. Basically it comes in at 70% successful today and the remaining 30% is waiting for programs compiled to take advantage of the Pentium 4’s features. Think of the Pentium 4 in terms of NVIDIA’s GeForce2 Ultra. The GeForce2 has hardware transform and lighting capabilities yet not many games currently take advantage of it. The performance/visual gains are definitely significant when using hardware T&L, but we need more support for it -- we all know that developers are creating games with onboard T&L in mind. This is the case with the Pentium 4. Many of its features still have yet to be realized. When developers do harness the powers within, you will see performance gains across the board. The GeForce2 and the Pentium 4 are similar in many ways and both are successful or going to be very successful in the near future.
 Click to enlarge. Be warned, the image is large.
It’s all about software optimization. Everyone wants games to be written to support hardware T&L so why shouldn’t things be written to support CPU optimizations and instruction enhancements? The point is, applications should! Intel includes new features for a reason.
 Click to enlarge
Productivity applications still have to become aware of the features that are available in the Pentium 4. Once they are recompiled or once new versions come out, we will do a re-evaluation of the Pentium 4. Remember, this is 7th generation vs. 7th generation. Many people are thinking that since the Athlon was released a while ago, the Pentium 4 must be an 8th generation processor. This is not correct.
There’s a lot of latent power lying dormant within the Pentium 4 core just waiting to be awaken. We’ll be there when it happens. Conclusion
Intel’s new brainchild has a lot going for it. Currently, there are some issues that need to be worked out but those will be done quickly considering Intel’s larger presence in the industry.
Some of the significant features of the Pentium 4 are: Hyper Pipeline technology, Advanced Dynamic Execution, 400MHz (quad pumped at 100MHz) AGTL+ system bus, Execution Trace Cache, Advanced Transfer Cache, 2xCore ALU unites, and Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2).
Altogether, the above features come together to create Intel’s much vaunted NetBurst architecture. Intel is gearing NetBurst for the future, and it’s quickly approaching. In 2001, we will see new games, new applications and new operating systems. All of these will take advantage of technology that is available that will accelerate your computing experience to new heights.
Right now there are creases that have to be ironed out, but ultimately everything should result in a smooth ride. The Pentium 4 has great performance in games and shows improvements across the board. Though it lags behind AMD’s Athlon in a few benchmarks and should have been in a better lead since it’s 400MHz above our Athlon, the gap is not too small -- a potentially good thing. The Pentium 4 also has strong speed scaling potentials and what it loses from the deep pipeline architecture it will ultimately make up in raw speed. If 2001 brings as many processor releases like this year; the Pentium 4’s future looks bright indeed.
Overall: [ 9.0/10 ]
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