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P4 Redefines PC Benchmarks
Does Intel's new Pentium 4 represent the next generation of computing, or is it just a bigger, more expensive version of Pentium III? The answer depends on how the chip is measured, which has led to some confusion about the new processor.
The controversy lies in initial performance results that show the 1.4GHz Pentium 4 delivers the same performance as a 1.0GHz Pentium III on SysMark 2000, a commonly used PC benchmark. The 1.5GHz Pentium 4 is better, but only by a few percent. For certain technical reasons, Intel did not report results on Winstone, another common benchmark, but that benchmark is likely to have similar results.
These results have led to some bad reviews for the new chip. But these reviewers are missing the point. Pentium 4 was not designed to accelerate the productivity applications (such as browsers, word processors, and spreadsheets) that are found in the SysMark tests. In almost all cases, these applications run fast enough on a 1.0GHz Pentium III (or even a 500MHz Pentium III). Additional increases in performance can be seen by benchmarks but not by real users.
Multimedia Focus
Instead, Intel focused on emerging applications such as voice recognition, 3D graphics, video editing, and audio compression. The company hopes to deliver processors that deal with speech, images, video, and music as easily as today's computers handle words and numbers. Future PC performance will be determined using these multimedia applications.
Pentium 4 excels in these new areas. For example, the 1.5GHz chip outruns a 1.0GHz Pentium by 26% on MPEG-2 video compression, 41% on Quake III (a 3D game), and 28% on voice recognition, according to Intel's tests. These results reflect Pentium 4's higher clock speed, advanced CPU architecture, and better memory bandwidth.
Some people are still not impressed by these advances, expecting a greater leap forward. We must keep in mind, however, that Pentium 4 is at the very beginning of its lifetime, whereas Pentium III has been fully optimized to its maximum performance. As Intel gains experience with the new design, Pentium 4 will reach 2.0GHz by mid-2001 using the same 0.18micron manufacturing process as the current chips. Pentium III, in contrast, will top out at 1.1GHz using the 0.18micron process.
At these speeds, Pentium 4's advantage on multimedia applications will reach 50% to 70%. Ultimately, Pentium 4 will double the performance of Pentium III on some applications, an impressive accomplishment.
Reduced Profits
Of course, these gains don't come for free. The Pentium 4 silicon is about twice as large as Pentium III's. This creates two manufacturing problems. First, a single wafer holds fewer of the larger chips. Second, a larger chip is more likely to contain a defect than a smaller chip, reducing the percentage of good chips. As a result, a single wafer will produce more than three times as many good Pentium III chips as Pentium 4 chips.
This difference raises the cost of building Pentium 4, which hurts Intel's profits. More important, it slows down the transition to the new chip.
To help with this problem, Intel is building several new fabs, but the real solution will be to move Pentium 4 to a 0.13micron process, which begins production in mid-2001. This new process greatly reduces the size of the Pentium 4 silicon. But Intel will not have enough 0.13micron capacity to build all of its Pentium 4 chips until 2002. Thus, Pentium III will continue to be available throughout 2001. During that time, Pentium 4 will be a more expensive "premium" product.
Pentium 4's large size is due to its high-performance CPU, which is a much more complicated design than Pentium III's. Pentium 4 requires 42 million transistors, whereas Pentium III has 26 million. The extra transistors and higher clock speed produce more heat as well: the new chip burns 70W at 1.5 GHz.
Moving to the 0.13micron process will reduce Pentium 4's power, but putting the chip into a portable PC will still be difficult. To address this problem, Intel is developing a new notebook processor that combines the Pentium III CPU with the Pentium 4 bus. Much of Pentium 4's performance increase, particularly on the multimedia tests, comes from the greater bandwidth of its new bus. Combining this bus with the low-power Pentium III CPU will give notebook PCs better performance without burning them up.
by Linley Gwennap
Linley Gwennap is the founder and principal analyst of The Linley Group (www.linleygroup.com), a technology analysis firm in Mountain View, California. The author can be contacted at linley@linleygroup.com.
(February 2001 Issue, Nikkei Electronics Asia) |
