Stuck on a desert island with a Pentium 4 (Northwood Vs. Prescott in 2016)

[ImperialGuardsman]

You wake up, head aching. The plane must have gone down somewhere in the ocean and the currents pulled you to the shore while you were unconscious. You stand up to look around and notice an arrow pointing towards the large mountain in the center of the island. As you approach, you see a cave with a welcome mat. Going inside you find a nearly complete computer with a card sitting beside it that says "Welcome."

The PC uses Intel's socket 478 and has everything in place (including an Ethernet cable going off to somewhere out of sight and a stack of operating systems so you can install whichever one you want), except the CPU and beefy cooler are not installed. You see two cpus sitting out. One is a 3.4 Ghz Northwood chip with hyper threading, 512kb of cache, and SSE2 instructions. The other is a 3.4 Ghz Prescott chip also with HT, 1Mb of cache, and SSE3 instructions. Which do you install? Looks like the island has a fast internet connection...

Food for thought: Back when Prescott was brand new, nothing used SSE3 and very few things were multi-threaded. Will the improvements made to HT via a larger cache and SSE3 make the Prescott worthwhile in 2016 or is old Northy still faster?

Oh look, there is some tubing to direct the exhaust from the PC into the bottom of the sleeping bag also in this cave, I guess you have to choose the Prescott...

I hope we can have some fun with this one! Serious performance answers and silly ones are much appreciated!

 

[jrrdmchls]

Sounds like you want us to do your homework for you! LOL!

 

[Supernova1138]

The Northwood would probably be better most of the time as I think the IPC actually went down with Prescott as Intel was still trying to push higher clockspeeds at all costs. It was with Prescott that Intel finally realized they weren't going to get to their 7GHz goal unless they wanted to make liquid nitrogen cooling standard equipment for all PCs and decided to do a full core redesign based on their mobile chips. The Prescott would have SSE3 support, but honestly I don't think that would make much of a difference. Either way, you're not running a whole lot of modern software on a one core/ two thread chip, so the opportunity for SSE3 to be a big benefit would be limited.

 

[synphul]

I preferred northwood which is the p4 I chose back in the day. Those two were actually compared here.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/p4-northwood-prescott-comparison-4,809-16.html

The prescott had twice the cache which was a bonus, it also had deeper pipelines with 31 vs the 20 stage pipeline of northwood. As I recall it was supposed to be an improvement but the issue turned out to be when branch prediction was wrong the pipeline was so deep that the shorter 20 stages of northwood recovered much quicker. Not to mention the heat factor, prescott's ran hotter.

 

[bicycle_repair_man]

If I were on a desert island, I don't think I'd be worrying about heat!

It it were me, I'd take the chassis apart and construct some kind of ridiculous boat, akin to MacGyver or The A-Team, and use it to escape. 😀

Actually, just IM'ing search and rescue would be easier, given the island's super-duper Internet connection!

 

[ImperialGuardsman]

If I were on a desert island, I don't think I'd be worrying about heat!

Actually, it can be quite cold at night in desert areas!

 

[ImperialGuardsman]

Sounds like you want us to do your homework for you! LOL!

A little bit, yes! You see, spending some time Googling the issue usually only brings back old reviews from when Prescott was hot off the presses. I have a hard time finding anyone doing a current comparison...for obvious reasons I suppose.