Frequent Asked Questions
Q: Is a Pentium 4 Machine better than an AMD Athlon machine?
A: There is no clear-cut of which one is
better
Pentium 4 is better at running bandwidth intensive applications, while
AMD’s
latency is lower than Pentium 4 in most cases. The determine factor to
decide
which one is better for you really depend what kind combination of
applications
you will use most.
Q: How large is Pentium 4's L1 cache, and how is it compared to AMD Athlon?
A: Pentium 4 ‘s L1 cache is 8KB, while AMD
Athlon
has 64KB of L1 cache.
Q: Is Pentium 4 faster than AMD Athlon?
A: so far, Pentium 4 is faster in pure clock speed, but that does not guarantee Pentium 4 will run applications faster than AMD Athlon. How fast a machine runs the applications depends on the combination of clock speed, cache latency, bandwidth, bus speed.
Q: How large is Pentium 4's L2 cache, and how is it compared to AMD Athlon?
A: Pentium 4’s L2 cache is 256KB, while AMD Athlon also has 256KB of L2 cache.
Q: What is the name of the 0.13-micron Pentium 4?
A: Northward.
Q: Will the .13-micron Pentium 4 implement a 512KB of L2?
A: most likely, since that will lessen the
effects
of RDRAM’s relatively high latency.
Q: What kind of memory buses Pentium 4 and Athlon use?
A: Pentium 4 uses RDRAM, and Athlon uses DDR SDRAM
Q: What is the difference between the P4's pipeline and G4e's pipeline?
A: Both processors want to run as many instructions as quickly as possible, but they attack this problem in two different ways. The G4e's approach can be summarized as "wide and shallow." Its designers added more functional units to its back end for executing instructions, and its front end tries to fill up all these units by issuing instructions to each functional unit in parallel. In order to extract the maximum amount of instruction-level parallelism (ILP) from the (linear) instruction stream the G4e's front end first moves a small batch of instructions onto the chip. Then, its out-of-order (OOO) execution logic examines them for interdependencies, spreads them out to execute in parallel, and then pushes them through the execution engine's nine functional units. Each of the G4e's functional units has a fairly short pipeline, so the instructions take very few cycles to move through and finish executing. Finally, in the last pipeline stages the instructions are put back in their original program order before the results are written back to memory.
The P4 takes a "narrow and deep" approach to moving through the
instruction stream. It has fewer functional units, but each of these units
has a deeper, faster pipeline. The fact that each functional unit has a
very deep pipeline means that each unit has a large number of available
execution slots and can thus work on quite a few instructions at once. So
instead of having, say, three short FP units operating slowly in parallel,
the P4 has one long FP unit that can hold and rapidly work on more
instructions in different stages of execution at once.
Q: What is Revamped Pipeline?
A: It is another name for Hyper-Pipelined
Technology.
Q: How large is
the L2 cache of the Pentium 4 / Northwood processor?
A :
The
Intel S478 Pentium 4's L2 cache size is 256KB while Northwood's L2 cache
size is
512KB.
Q: At what clock
speeds will the Intel S478 Pentium 4 and Northwood processors
operate?
A :
Initial versions of the Intel Pentium
4 processor are planned to operate at clock speeds of 2.0G and 1.9GHz,
based on
Intel's 0.18-micron process technology. Later on, there will be 1.8GHz,
1.7GHz
or lower speed versions for value PC segment. Northwood's speeds will
range from
2.0GHz to 2.4GHz and beyond.
Q: How well
does the Intel S478 Pentium 4 processor perform relative to the S423
Pentium
4 processor?
A : Yes. Intel S478 Pentium 4 based system has better performance than all existing PC systems, and it fully utilizes the most advanced process technology to stretch its computing power into 2.4GHz and beyond. Most importantly, the price for such an advanced, next-generation CPU could priced affordably for everyone. S423 Pentium 4 platform might be your interest, but due to lack of higher CPU speed support (limited to 2.0GHz), if future upgradeability and longer system life cycle is your concern, then S478 Pentium 4 platform will be your only choice.