3.2 P4 with 2MB extra cache - Extreme Edition [Archive]

sandman

09-16-2003, 05:26 PM

Originally posted by Kunaak
thing I cant tell from that article, is that just another Xeon, or is there really gonna be a normal P4 CPU with a 2 meg cache and 800 FSB?

from what I've heard it's basically a pentium 4, that is exactly like a Xeon.

faruquehabib

09-16-2003, 05:33 PM

psh...no worries. the athlon64 fx-51 chips are gonna reign supreme until a super-high powered prescott can challenge

Kunaak

09-16-2003, 06:25 PM

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1870

anadtechs got some nice info too, and a benchmark comparision is promised soon.
for the die hard Intel Guys, this cpu may hold them over till the prescotts.

2.5 meg cache certainly helps ;)

WxChaser

09-16-2003, 06:34 PM

2.5 meg cache certainly helps It sure does baby!

ROACH

09-16-2003, 07:03 PM

Good thing the Abit Max3 supports L3 cache. If you have bigtoes modded bios you can enable it. The cache won't make that much difference.

The only thing I hate is how Intel adds like 1mb cache back in the day of the PIII's, then back to 256k when P4 423png launched:mad: Sounds like Micro$oft

MudWhistle

09-16-2003, 07:23 PM

bah, there will be a few key benchmarks that the cache will help, mostly stuff you tweakers wont care much for. I doubt the cache alone will be enough to compete with what AMD has coming.

Ranger Loki

09-16-2003, 07:49 PM

Seriously, do you need that much cache? How can it REALLY affect a game? Maybe it helps SOME, but not noticably if you ask me....

Stang_Man

09-16-2003, 07:55 PM

hmm, wonder if it'll perform better than a64??

retrospooty

09-16-2003, 07:56 PM

Itall depends on the speed of the cache.

If it was the same speed as Intel's L2 cache, it would definitley help performance alot !

But its L3, and likely slower. As always, wait for real benchmarks to see.

Evil_Spork

09-16-2003, 09:02 PM

OMFG INTEL BARTON!!!!!!!!! YYEAAHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tedinde

09-16-2003, 09:07 PM

afaik the extra cache doesnt really make it a lot faster, at least not in games and thats what its supposed to be designed for... weird

So i can dump my P4 and just put my celeron "northwood" that will do 3.45ghz??

Major

09-16-2003, 09:27 PM

This may actually be bad news, I heard a while back that the Prescott was going to have a new socket and new ATX specification. Then I heard that Intel was going to keep the current P4 socket for awhile b4 changing over. This might just be a stop gap measure from intel, and a sign that a new socket is going to be implemented on prescott ?

CCW

09-16-2003, 10:57 PM

Lets all hope (well not all of us, only you rich guys) that like the Xeons, they are unlcoked so you can use the multi as well :)

Originally posted by Tedinde
So i can dump my P4 and just put my celeron "northwood" that will do 3.45ghz??

Tedinde, there was a thread quite a qhile back on a guy who got a 1.8A to 3.6GHz. The clock was high but the movement from Celeron to P4 cache terms does make a difference. The Celerons are rubbish for 3D Benching because of this. The 2MB cache may not help in this case, I dont know and Im not going to judge it but the difference in cache from Celeron > P4 really makes a difference to the performance.

Craig

toymaker

09-17-2003, 04:08 AM

It's easier and cheaper to just add a L3 cache compared to increasing the L2. A 2.4C (oc'd to 3.6 Ghz, 1200 Mhz FSB)with 2mb L3 running at CPU speed would be very interesting.:thumbsup:

ALT-F13

09-17-2003, 06:40 AM

Tedinde.
I had 2.4 Celeron that could OC up to 3660MHz. And u know, it was significantly worse than 2.0 @ 2.8 P4 in 3D performance...

As for subj... I start knocking to local Intel office door:). Usually they have samples of new CPUs month before oficial release, so probably EE is already there:)

It would be nice to bench P4 Xtreme Edition on VapoChill Xtreme Edition for XtremeSystems team :) Triple Xtreme... LOL.

Intronic

09-17-2003, 06:42 AM

Cool extra L3-Cache, hope its overclocking well :)

KAIN

09-17-2003, 08:03 AM

I got the faintest hint of sarcasm in Tedinde's message ;

I'm guessing he was pointing out that extra cache does help system performance :D

dropadrop

09-17-2003, 08:10 AM

You can expect systems based on the Extreme Edition processor to be due out in November, but Intel won't be following up with boxed CPUs until the beginning of next year.

Bra!nFreeZe^

09-17-2003, 08:18 AM

ALT-F13 u mean xXx Triple X! ;)

Av3ng3r

09-17-2003, 08:33 AM

I want that processor now! :slobber:

zzxxxzzxxxzz

09-17-2003, 10:05 AM

hell yea brand new proccesor to overclock and more speed performance think about it like this how is this bad news you dont want it dont buy it its not like somebodys forcing you to buy personally who cares when the chip comes out if there is a huge perforamnce then great , if we not its not like its holding back the prescott which was the next proccesor to be released anyways

JCviggen

09-17-2003, 12:06 PM

funny how they add cache and call it a gaming CPU when that cache is mostly going to make a difference in workstation apps and stuff.. games will be a bit faster but not that much. Intel is wasting silicon if you ask me,,, theres no substitute for an on-die memory controller imho.... my jaw has dropped a few times with frame rates i saw in the last few days...

WxChaser

09-17-2003, 01:12 PM

It's official now:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11584

To quote from their article:

Intel spokesman George Alfs told the INQ the chip would sport a 800MHz frontside bus allied to the 2.5MB L3 of cache in total. He said the company had worked closely with OEMs who build games systems and who really wanted something for gamers. He said the extra cache would improve the performance of the chip significantly, by reducing the need for the processor to go off to memory for data. This combined with the implementation of Hyperthreading in the chip will deliver unparalleled performance. Both Half-Life2 and Doom 3 will implement Hyperthreading enhancements to exploit the technology.

Major

09-17-2003, 01:37 PM

Note to self: "start saving money for new uber P4" :D

Hallowed

09-17-2003, 03:32 PM

Some of you misunderstood ted.

Didn't get the joke, etc.

Adding cache will always benefit games. If you think going from CAS2 2.5 to 2, or upping the FSB is a huge gain, how about removing the wait to access memory altogether? Cache is just lightning-speed memory, and it should help gaming more than nearly anything.

Memory latency is a non-issue if you dont have to access it. ;)

Sarcastro

09-17-2003, 03:53 PM

Originally posted by Hallowed
Cache is just lightning-speed memory, and it should help gaming more than nearly anything.

I recently noticed that when I ran memtest86. You can see the L1 and L2 cache speeds in the upper left corner there. They are indeed jaw dropping when you compare it to DDR memory's speed.

Penguin4x4

09-17-2003, 04:28 PM

Did anyone read the Anandtech article?

"Intel's decision to launch this processor a week before AMD's launch of the Athlon 64 should give you an indication of the performance AMD is offering under gaming environments. The integration of an L3 cache will hide some of the latencies of going to main memory, similar to what AMD's on-die memory controller does when compared to conventional PC platforms."

Ace-a-Rue

09-17-2003, 07:37 PM

This is going to be interesting. AMD & Intel square off for real this time...I wonder what the cost's of this profound 3.2 will be?

retrospooty

09-17-2003, 08:13 PM

Originally posted by Ace-a-Rue
This is going to be interesting. AMD & Intel square off for real this time...I wonder what the cost's of this profound 3.2 will be?

priced around $740 in 1,000 unit quantities. per Anandtech.

Bah... I'll wait till its $200

CCW

09-17-2003, 10:46 PM

Originally posted by JCviggen
funny how they add cache and call it a gaming CPU when that cache is mostly going to make a difference in workstation apps and stuff.. games will be a bit faster but not that much. Intel is wasting silicon if you ask me,,, theres no substitute for an on-die memory controller imho.... my jaw has dropped a few times with frame rates i saw in the last few days...

A hell of a lot of gamers *think* they know what they are talking about when they really don't so many would snap it up believeing it would be better. Its clever just marketing upon Intel's part methinks.

Craig

st0nedpenguin

09-19-2003, 05:29 AM

It's probably not worth much for gamers, but imagine 3dsmax/Maya on two of those babies.

:slobber:

Johnny Bravo

09-19-2003, 06:02 AM

So in essence it's all just a marketing ploy to bridge the performance gap till the prescott comes along then? Or will it actually be worth anything?

saaya

09-19-2003, 06:13 AM

Originally posted by Tedinde
So i can dump my P4 and just put my celeron "northwood" that will do 3.45ghz??

its not L2 cache! and every cpu has its limits where extra cache doesnt really help. the barton only runs a little faster than tbreds in games.

PMM

09-19-2003, 06:30 AM

dropadrop

09-19-2003, 07:25 AM

As we expected the 2 MB L3-cache can not do any wonders for Games, which are somewhat cacheable but also need streams of new data (memory intensive). The best result is a 14% in Comanche, which is of course quite impressive, as it means the L3-cache pushes the 3.2 GHz to the level of a 3.7 GHz Pentium 4. Quite a few games give only a 5-6% performance increase.

http://www.aceshardware.com/

STEvil

09-19-2003, 10:46 AM

well duh 8-)

zakelwe

09-19-2003, 12:11 PM

Anyone see the Aces benchmarks before they got pulled ?

Regards

Andy

shrae

09-19-2003, 12:21 PM

Even 2MB of L2 cache would not help gaming that signifcantly. It's not like we're talking about going from 128k->256k or even 256k->512k. And it's L3 cache no less, so the Celeron/P4 comparison is hardly valid.

15% fps improvement on Comanche is pretty substantial though, it's much, much more than I expected. 5-6% that aceshardware claimed they got on most other games seems much more reasonable for simply a cache increase.

zakelwe

09-19-2003, 12:33 PM

Originally posted by JCviggen
Intel is wasting silicon if you ask me,,, theres no substitute for an on-die memory controller imho.... my jaw has dropped a few times with frame rates i saw in the last few days...

Public or private frame rates ? Spill the beans if private :)

Regards

Andy

dojobi

09-19-2003, 12:34 PM

Yeah I saw them. I can't remember much, but it did have some healthy increases in performance. Particularly in Comanche 4. I think it was up around what you'd expect from a 3.7GHz level or something. Damn my bad memory - anyone got the rest of the benches in their cache? :)

saaya

09-19-2003, 01:35 PM

surely it only helps on frequantly accessed data where common
info is passed around and that would have to be only 2.5megs
of data cause after that your hitting main memory again anyway.

How much data is in the average game these days? my UT2K3
is 2.6Gigs I know not all of that gets used but seeing that
is 1000x more than the cache I can't see it being that much of a
help the main memory will still be holding the bulk of the code.

the cache of a cpu is not a frame buffer on videocards that buffers textures etc, the cache of a cpu stores certain commands and results of certain calculations so the cpus doesnt have to do the same calculations over and over again if some commands repeat.

games dont dont really get faster from cache because you dont get the same instructions over and over again like on server apps. server apps can run up to 100% faster with more cpu cache, but thats only because the same commands have to be executed over and over again.

shrae

09-19-2003, 02:04 PM

Here's a little document by Dell talking about L3 cache and its improvements in a server environment:

http://www.dell.com/us/en/biz/topics/power_ps1q03-stanford.htm

Here is a tomshardware article comparing dual Xeon CPUs with 512k cache versus to 1MB L3 cache:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030811/

So there is already established benchmarks showing the relative ineffectiveness of increasing L3 cache. Note that in the comanche demo, the difference is about 5% which is more in-line with what we'd expect. Having 2MB over 1MB (in the case of the Xeons) shouldn't really result in an additional boost brining the fps increase to 15%, but whatever, we'll assume that the aceshardware report was accurate.

ALT-F13

09-19-2003, 05:27 PM

Just asked our contact in Intel. _They_ will have samples in mid-October, so EE is definitely unavailable for testing now... So i even don't know how to comment Aces' information...

retrospooty

09-19-2003, 05:31 PM

could be a Xeon with 2m cache... same chips

CCW

09-20-2003, 12:38 AM

Originally posted by retrospooty
could be a Xeon with 2m cache... same chips

Didn't think the Xeons had L3 cache.

Craig

CCW

09-20-2003, 12:38 AM

Originally posted by retrospooty
could be a Xeon with 2m cache... same chips

Didn't think the Xeons had L3 cache.

Craig

saaya

09-20-2003, 03:18 AM

they do, tomshardware reviewed them

retrospooty

09-20-2003, 06:58 AM

Originally posted by CCW
Didn't think the Xeons had L3 cache.

Craig

Not all of them, but there is a line that currently goes up to 2.8ghz with 2megs of l3 cache. The others have 512k l2, and I think 1 meg options.

All the 3.2EE is , is the same chip, rated at a higher speed. So essentially nothing new for Intel.

Poki

09-20-2003, 07:05 AM

Hello Xtreme Systems Members!

The 2MB on-die L3 cache takes the Northwood's 55 million transistors and balloons it to an incredible 169 million transistors. We will have some benchmarking time with the Extreme Edition very soon...
169 million transistors are going to make some serious heat and kill some voltage regulators on some mobo's if pushed very far IMO.