the Prescott p4's

just read today the official specs for the Prescott p4 core to be released in the spring. (i'm shure some of you know this, but thought i'd inform the others) .09 micron process, 1 mb L2cache, HYPERTHREADING! 32 bit alu's instead of 16. 667 mhz front side bus. it's supporting chipset with have dual channel ddr333! (no rdram support as of this time) southbridge will support usb 2.0 and SERIAL ATA! release speeds aren't official but expected to start at 4ghz and possible 64 bit architecture! that's gonna be one bad mofo

official specs?you got linkage? i've only ever seen rumours. one of which was an 800mhz fsb. (200mhz quad pumped)

read it in the new issue of CPU magazing, an article by Anand Lal Shimpi founder of anadtech.com. he said it was official, that's all i know.

/me heads to anadtech.

EDIT: thanks. found it.
EDIT again: hmmm. that article is dated 12th of march.
i think i'll take it all with a grain of salt.

wah a killer and lean machine. best buy of the season

the prescotts are supposed to debut at 3.2ghz and max out somewhere around 4-4.5ghz. but i heard that after the last northwood at 3.2ghz in january they are taking a break until late summer to release the prescotts.

jeez i can't believe i'm realistically talking about 4ghz!!!

Maxvla said:

jeez i can't believe i'm realistically talking about 4ghz!!!

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i know. i was thinking just the same thing the other day.
they're starting to sound like nokia mobilephone models. 3110, 3310. ooh can't wait til they get up to the 5510.

flaming gerbil said:

32 bit alu's instead of 16.

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16-bit ALU's? I think it's been a long time since CPU's were limited to 16-bit ALU function. Do you mean they're increasing the number of registers available to the ALU's (couldn't find the specific article you cite)?

Maxvla said:

the prescotts are supposed to debut at 3.2ghz and max out somewhere around 4-4.5ghz. but i heard that after the last northwood at 3.2ghz in january they are taking a break until late summer to release the prescotts.

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Yeah that's what Ed seemed to think when he talked about it last week. I doubt they're really taking a break though. Wouldn't it make more sense to assume they're waiting to see what happens with Hammer before committing to faster Northwoods?

it's on page 36, new issue of cpu. yep read it again he said it was official. sorry that's 16-bit double pumped alu's going to 32 bit double pumped alu's.) the "springdale chipset" beside what i mentioned will also include built in wireless ethernet and also include what they are calling CSA (communications streaming architecture) "a dedicated bus for high speed networking" (like gigbit ethernet)

yep, i bet they sitting tight on the 64-bit architecture to see what happens with amd this fall. from what i understand the clawhammer is perfectlly backwards compatible with 32-bit software, whereas intels 64-bit system is somewhat backwards compatible in that it will run 32-bit software but at a much slower rate than amd's architecture.

I see, you're right, the current P4's have 16-bit ALU's. However, two are skewed together by one-half core clock cycle to allow for 32-bit interger operations. Of course this doesn't cause much of a performance hit since ALU ops are done at 2x core clock speed. A 32-bit ALU probably won't give a huge performance boost. What'd be really nice is if they raised the floating point execution units' speed to 2x core clock.

As for 32-bit support on the Itanium, yeah, it's weak. But those chips really are intended strictly for use with 64-bit applications. I think most enterprise applications will use Xeons for 32-bit applications and Itaniums for 64-bit and see better performance than trying to run both on one chip.

MAD SPECS MAN!!!

sigh, seems i will never upgrade my fawken computar with so much new stuff buzz

The P4 has 1 complex, 32-bit ALU which runs at the core clock and 2 skewed, double-pumped 16-bit ALU's for simple ALU operations. With the move to double-pumped 32-bit ALU's, simple ALU operations on large integers no longer take the full clock, but rather, only half the clock. This would improve integer performance (for simple operations) significantly. I'm not sure whether the complex ALU is going to be double-pumped or not though. Another improvement that wasn't mentioned was the double-pumped L1 data cache and possibly trace cache (in that it runs at twice the clockspeed).
And of course, there's the increase L2 cache, the increased L1 cache and possibly trace cache, an improved version of hyperthreading, and the increase in FSB, and let's not forget the improvements in clockspeed.
I don't know where this 3.2 GHz came from though. As far as I've heard, Intel has not made any statements about what frequency Prescott would be introduced at. However, it seems feasible to say that the .13 micron Northwood has a lot more life than just 3.2 GHz. It also seems implausible that Intel would wait an entire quarter before releasing a faster grade processor.

if the 4ghz could overclock at well as the 1.6a northy toaroubd 90%, i would be getting speeds up to 7Ghz or more. woo. As long as intel edges out amd in everything and good for overclocking, I will buy it

imgod2u said:

With the move to double-pumped 32-bit ALU's, simple ALU operations on large integers no longer take the full clock, but rather, only half the clock. This would improve integer performance (for simple operations) significantly.

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Load and store are still done at core clock speed, are they not? Unless they change this too, you can't do anything with the ALU result that's out 1/2 cycle early. The only real advantage I can think of it that you could skew two 32-bit ALUs to do a 64-bit op in one cycle.

??? n00b question

dansonang said:

if the 4ghz could overclock at well as the 1.6a northy toaroubd 90% ...

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sorry im just a n00b....

what's a toaroubd ? is it like a mixed northy and and a athlon's thoroughbred

Prescott is the Intel Pentium5 Processor

Prescott 666
Prescott B 800

.09 micron process
1MB L2 cache
Hyperthreading
666MHz / 800MHz FSB
Socket478 Support (Backwards compatibility with Pentium4)
8 64-bit extensions (25% 64-bit)
3.33GHz / 3.50GHz / 3.66GHz


The rumor where they say it will start at 3.2GHz is FAKE and false. First off, you cannot attain 3.20GHz with a 666MHz FSB. You need a 533MHz FSB to attain this clock speed. 666MHz FSB closest would be 3166MHz (3.16GHz).

Simply explained, hope this helped..


DS-Master