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pentium 4 still alive

S

smith94672

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
153
What kind of processor speed are you seeing at your workplace or school computers?

I'm still seeing lots of computers with the Pentium 4 label. About 15% of the computers I see are either a Pentium D or a Core 2 Duo, but with the latter to a lesser extent.

If you're not doing anything math-intensive or gaming, I guess the need for faster machines have finally hit a plateau, huh?
 
If all you're doing is word docs and internet a P4 is overkill.. academic places tend to be the last to upgrade their machines, or per my own experience. Most of the P4 machines are running XP Pro or other not Vista. Workplaces.. depends on exactly where you're talking about.
 
I just imagine a Pentium 4 made in 45nm or 32nm process instead 180 and 90 nm.
That could be run passively cooled onto a Nano ITX (120 x 120 mm) motherboard.
 
Just think of a Celeron 430-440 with HT, and a scythe ninja mini as the cooler :eek:
 
Wow, I just read that the Atom "Medfield" will come 2011 in 32 nm technology.
 
Medfield is expected to be manufactured using a 32 nm process and will integrate the processor, the graphics core and the I/O controller hub into a single chip.
It appears that there may be two different versions of Medfield; one designed for mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and one for netbooks.
Their graphics subsystem would likely be different, with the netbook version using a more powerful Intel-designed graphics core and the MID version possibly using a PowerVR graphics core designed by Imagination Technologies.

Both graphics cores would likely still include at least basic multimedia functionality, such as hardware video acceleration.

Tom's Hardware
 
Cov said:
I just imagine a Pentium 4 made in 45nm or 32nm process instead 180 and 90 nm.
That could be run passively cooled onto a Nano ITX (120 x 120 mm) motherboard.
Click to expand...

You're kidding, right? The pentium 4's thermal properties got worse as the process got smaller. How backwards was that?
 
Pentium 4's thermal properties get worse the smaller the CPU gets ?
Wow, I have to let this sentence melt on my tongue.
The thermal properties ... wow.
Does that mean going from nano back to micro would decrease the heat development ?
 
bicycle_wreck said:
So... like an Atom? :)
Click to expand...
The Atom architecture shares few characteristics with the P4 architecture.
Xaero_toast said:
You're kidding, right? The pentium 4's thermal properties got worse as the process got smaller. How backwards was that?
Click to expand...
Actually, they got better. Prescott ran much hotter than Northwood but that was due to major architectural changes and not the process change (Prescott was different enough from Northwood/Willamette that it could have been called Pentium 5). Going from Prescott/Smithfield (90nm) to Cedar Mill/Presler (65nm) made the chips run much cooler though, and the highest overclock ever achieved (>8GHz) was actually done on a Cedar Mill P4.
 
Xaero_toast said:
You're kidding, right? The pentium 4's thermal properties got worse as the process got smaller. How backwards was that?
Click to expand...
Not really. The move from Northwood to Prescott at 90nm had the thermal problems from bad leakage. The P4 65nm shrink in Cedar Mill had much lower power usage, topping out at 86W/3.6GHz/2MB L2. Northwood topped out at 89W/3.4GHz/512KB L2 and Prescott topped out at 115W/3.8GHz/1MB L2.

Prescott was a rushed disaster.
 
Atom is a highly modified PII(III?) core. But its essentially what you are talking about. Old tech highly shrunk for low power usage while keeping acceptable performance.
 
angelicvoices said:
If all you're doing is word docs and internet a P4 is overkill..
Click to expand...

all of the computer’s at my work place is P4 660 (@3600 Mhz), they paid A LOT for document control, human recourse, security, accounting, CAD, and OCR software but the IT admin still thinks the processors doesn’t need an upgrade :(
 
Well in my lab we have:

1x Pentium D xxx
1x Core 2 Duo E6700
1x Core 2 Quad Qxxxx
1x Core i7 940
 
Its actually funny how most of our stuff out there is based on architecture from the p2/p3 days then the p4.
 
We just recently got computers with Xeon X5450, quad cores at 3GHz.

Im seriously suspecting something is wrong with the case design though, the other day after 4 hours of consecutive ANSYS solving the processor got to 89C (Idles around 45C). Hell, the FB-DMM's (server ram? no idea what that is) sit around 50C just with CAD, Excel, word, and this net window open. There's a noticable temperature difference from the Engineering end of the office to the finance. It sucks ><
 
smith94672 said:
What kind of processor speed are you seeing at your workplace or school computers?
Click to expand...

The school I used to go to still has PIII's and low end P4 (1.8Ghz to 2.4Ghz without HT) to do photoshop. :rolleyes:


So I just toke my laptop to highschool for those that classes.
 
Zero82z said:
Actually, they got better. Prescott ran much hotter than Northwood but that was due to major architectural changes and not the process change (Prescott was different enough from Northwood/Willamette that it could have been called Pentium 5). Going from Prescott/Smithfield (90nm) to Cedar Mill/Presler (65nm) made the chips run much cooler though, and the highest overclock ever achieved (>8GHz) was actually done on a Cedar Mill P4.
Click to expand...

Thanks for clarifying. I had enough troubles with prescotts that I gave just couldn't trust another intel cpu until conroe came out, so I never built a cedar mill machine.
 
I work at a fairly large law school and I'd say we probably have 40 to maybe 50 percent of our systems still on P4s. The other half is variations of the Core or Core 2 series. We aren't on any timed update cycle (which I hate) so things are kinda jumbled, we have to make too many images for too many models in my opinion.
 
At work my primary machine is a P4 2.8 GHz with 1GB RDRAM. Slowest system in the building. :(
 
Still mostly P4's here. Mostly from Dell. A few Pentiums D's and a few Athlon X2's and Core2's that I put together as low power budget machines. They're really stingy though so I feel like the difference in power draw would be a good reason to get more low end athlons and core2's.
 
I do mostly on-site computer repair and I would agree that the vast majority of the computers I work on and see in the places I go to are still P4's.

I don't think that is really a bad thing though. I get a lot of systems with like 256 or 512megs of ram and maybe a 30-40g hard drive that is totally full. Once I get that up to at least a gig of ram and throw a new hard drive in there, it's like a brand new computer for them. I had a system that I just finished, a 2Ghz P4, and they all couldn't believe how fast it was.
 
my gateway laptop has a p4 518 mobile chip 2.8 HT and i still like it. i like the p4 its old school and has been around forever
 
It's funny just how bad the Pentium 4 was...

Like for office and school work sure fine but for anything else... Fail.

AMD was God back in those days with the Athlon 64 and even the Athlon XP.

My old 3000+ Barton I had crapped all over some much faster clocked P4 northwoods maybe even the first Prescotts and cost me so much less money than Intel was charging.
 
i know p4'w were not the best. but i always had a thing with HT. i know it sounds bad but its cool how they did it to p4's and then made HT look like a super star with the I7's
 
My university all use the P4 3.6 ghz. I was pretty surprised to see a 3.6 processor but pulling up Hulu for 10 min crashes the computer.
 
my college in the computer labs has only a couple of P4's but they are almost done replacing them with some Core 2 Duo at least all the laptops they have are core 2 duo,

can't wait till they get netbooks which should be by next semester :p
 
thebeephaha said:
It's funny just how bad the Pentium 4 was...
Click to expand...

Bad compared to what? Sure you can say clock for clock they were slower, etc, but as an overall package they were quite competitive.

Like for office and school work sure fine but for anything else... Fail.
Click to expand...

Fail in what way? From the time the Northwood core was released in early 2002 for about 2 years afterward, if you wanted to build a gaming rig with the very fastest processor, that processor was a Pentium 4. At that time, chips like the 1.6a or the 2.0a were cheap and very overclockable.

AMD was God back in those days with the Athlon 64 and even the Athlon XP.
Click to expand...

By later in 2002 people were getting P4 2.4's and overclocking them to 3.0+ on a regular basis, AMD didn't have anything that could compete for a good year or more until the Athlon 64 was released. Even then the P4 was no slouch and most agreed that a HT P4 retained a multi-tasking advantage until the Athlon X2 was released.

So I really don't see how the P4 was "bad" in any way. It's competitiveness with other chips has been both good and bad over the years, but it had it's day as the top dog chip and really doesn't have any glaring deficiencies which prevent people from continuing to use P4 based systems today and for years to come.

I still have my old dual xeon rig, which was basically dual 3ghz northwoods. Ran Farcry 2 on it the other day and was pleasantly surprised to be getting over 30fps.
 
You can say whatever you want in its defence, but even Intel admits P4 netburst architecture was horrible. Athlon64 was king for awhile, then AthlonX2 was the way to go, then Intel finally said "here is core. AMD loses." Athlon64 was simply far too efficient compared to Pentium4 to say that Pentium4 was "good."
 
LAiN_OfTheWired said:
Athlon64 was simply far too efficient compared to Pentium4 to say that Pentium4 was "good."
Click to expand...
Pentium 4 was good compared to Athlon XP, which it beat out quite handily. Not to mention the fact that the P4 platform was much more reliable than the AXP platform. The only decent chipsets for Athlon XP chips were from the NF2 series, and those still weren't as good as Intel's 865 and 875 chipsets.

Yes, the A64 chips were faster than P4s. But for a pretty long time before that, there was nothing faster than a Northwood P4, especially once the C models came out and pretty much every chip could do 3.2GHz reliably on air.
 
I had an Athlon XP 1800+ that I was able to clock to 2.2ghz back in 2002. Paired with my Radeon 9700pro, I was on top of the gaming world! :)
 
Gentlemen, please ... don't let this thread become an AMD vs Intel thread.
 
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