Was Prescott really that bad?

[superstition]

RDRAM had lower latency in high bandwidth scenarios (at least on the P3 platform, which RDRAM was terrible on, I might add). This is comparing single channel RD-PC800 to SD-PC133.

Well SDRAM is garbage. Everything I've read said RDRAM's problems were:

1) high latency that significantly reduced the advantage of higher bandwidth
2) cost
3) worse performance per watt

In that order, roughly.

Intel should have had enough clout in the market to do something about DRAM maker collusion against RDRAM if it had wanted to. I suppose it just decided it was easier to be with them rather than against them. And, the latency of RDRAM

 

[sm625]

It's not that the P3 and P4 architectures were bad but AMD managed to acquire NexGen for a cool $850m in 1995 which then led to the K6 and K7 cpus and well the rest is history. I often wonder what would have happened if NexGen didn't sellout and continued to develop cpus. I guess we will never know.

Bulldozer 4.0 would be competing with Pentium 9, trading blows.

 

[Rinkk]

I had the "pleasure" of running a Pentium 4 1.7GHZ Willamate, with a Gigabyte P4 533 Titanium motherboard, Geforce 2 MX-400 and 512MB of SDRAM till 2006, Willmate hit its celling REALLY quick, my dad (i was young back then) never managed to crack 2GHZ, anything over that resulted in a lock-up. Now, it might have been the motherboard that started having bloated caps since 2004 and ran WITH bloated caps till 2015 when I tried upgrading to a Celeron D and I pulled the heatsink, CPU came with it and the CPU socket cracked. That system is now running the successor of that board with 800MHZ FSB support, dual channel DDR-400 aswell. But uh, I have no CPU for it cause I ain't touching Willamate with a 10 foot barge pole and it seems like the Pentium 4 3.0GHZ HT I put in it is half-dead, so that's unfortunate.

I'll probably try to find a good CPU for that today.

 

[Ichinisan]

Williamette was worse.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I'll probably try to find a good CPU for that today.

That's some serious dedication to Netburst.

 

[Rinkk]

That's some serious dedication to Netburst.

I have actually in my pile. A Pentium 4 2.4GHZ. It's not all that fast or anything but I use it for XP/98 gaming so it works.

Now I need a new graphics card for that rig cause that FX5500 is horse.

 

[ninaholic37]

Lots of people on the Puppy Linux forums still use Pentium 4s. I guess since it's a light distro, P3 or P4 is still an adequate base for most general tasks. I had Windows 98 on my Pentium M laptop but it has no soundblaster compatible card for old games, so I just use Wine and Dosbox on it now usually, or FreeDos with PC Speaker sounds (awww yeah).

 

[DrMrLordX]

PC Speaker 4 lyfe

 

[bononos]

The Prescott was better than its predecessors but it still ran hotter than AMD equivalents. Kind of he situation we have today but reversed with the AMD Bulldozer family.

Williamette was worse.

Was that the model that was slower than the PIII and the budget duron? Not a good start for the P4.

 

[podspi]

There really is no reason to use that old stuff anymore. I understand the waste not want not argument, but stuff from that era was so energy inefficient... As others have said, you can get similar performance from A53s these days. Why not get a $5 pi and call it a day? You'll get a more modern system that'll be really energy efficient.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Was that the model that was slower than the PIII and the budget duron? Not a good start for the P4.

The early P4 were indeed terrible, performance per watt metric was atrocious, compared to P3.

 

[SPBHM]

There really is no reason to use that old stuff anymore. I understand the waste not want not argument, but stuff from that era was so energy inefficient... As others have said, you can get similar performance from A53s these days. Why not get a $5 pi and call it a day? You'll get a more modern system that'll be really energy efficient.

pi can't run most of the software a p4 can (specially old games), also you can't realistically get a decent pi and accessories for $5 and even the most expensive pi is very limited with 1GB of memory and so on.

better to get some cheap Core 2 Duo old PC or something than a PI for desktop usage.

 

[Torn Mind]

There really is no reason to use that old stuff anymore. I understand the waste not want not argument, but stuff from that era was so energy inefficient... As others have said, you can get similar performance from A53s these days. Why not get a $5 pi and call it a day? You'll get a more modern system that'll be really energy efficient.

People use Pentium 4s because they don't know any better, do not want to upgrade, and/or cannot upgrade. But it still is able to get things done for them.
Software is what makes hardware useful. Being locked into ARM, and the Pi's lack of peripheral connectors, makes for a more cumbersome machine. In the instances legacy hardware support is need, an desktop or laptop will provide the ports or connectors to use those products.

I'd like to know where Pi's are five dollars. They're 20 dollars used and the Pi 3 is about $35.

 

[hojnikb]

You can get an orangepi pc for 15$ pr pc2 for 20$ new and will blow away those p4 boxes and will use at least 50x less power. No reason to keep those clunkers around, unless it's something specific (cnc machines or something like that)

 

[podspi]

I was being a bit facetious, I guess my point is that why bother with something that is barely faster than a toy these days?

You can buy something like this for $50:

https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Corp-BOXSTCK1A8LFC-Compute-STCK1A8LFC/dp/B00W7KAABK/


I have no illusions that using the above would be an enjoyable experience, but having had to use a Pentium D a few years ago as a work machine (work machine! not my fault...) - these machines are not terribly enjoyable either, and they use a lot more electricity as well.

Anyway, I would say Prescott wasn't that bad (or good) at the time... It was bad enough that a good product from AMD allowed them to gain some marketshare. After netburst and until recently, Intel's execution has been so good that there hasn't been a chance for anybody (excepting mobile, really).

 

[IntelUser2000]

Prescott was much better on the low end with Celeron. It improved performance by an average of 15% per clock by rough eyeballing.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1363/14

Artificially imposed limits(in this case, cache cutdown) got lifted a lot with Prescott changes. It usually seems to be the case, whether in CPUs or GPUs.