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prescot vs northwood

P Masta Flex

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 27, 2003
Messages
77
whats the difference between the two? the cache? I heard they run hotter, and thats about it.
 
They are different cores. The Northwood is built on a 130nm process whereas the Prescott is built on a 90nm process. This means the individual traces on the latter are smaller. The Northwood has a 20? stage pipeline and the Prescott has a 31-stage pipeline. The Northwood has a slightly higher IPC and also has half the cache of the Prescott. The Prescott has an improved branch predictor and as a result, the Prescott-based Celeron is a much better processor than the Northwood-based Celeron. The Prescott also scales better than the Northwood.

The Prescott runs hotter, and at current speeds, slower than the Northy. Prescott also has the SSE3 instruction set and is 64bit capable, but this is not enabled currently. It is much more than just power usage and larger cache.
 
[Mad_Pyro]
> also has half the cache of the Prescott.

Both the Prescott's L1 and L2 were doubled.

> The Prescott has an improved branch predictor and as a result, the
> Prescott-based Celeron is a much better processor than the
> Northwood-based Celeron.

The Prescott also has a nastier branch misprediction penalty.
 
Some people say that the prescott should be called a P5...... .. . . . . .

If you're in the market to buy a P4 i'd say go Northwood at the moment.
 
[STL]
> The Prescott also has a nastier branch misprediction penalty.

[jamestime88]
> whats this?

When a branch is mispredicted, the pipeline has to be flushed. When your pipeline is 31 stages, you have to throw away more work than when it is 20 stages.

The Willy/Northy branch misprediction penalty was nasty, but the Prescott's is nastier.

It forms one part of the Prescott's performance picture. Thanks to the better predictor, cache increases, reduced integer multiply latency, faster shift/rotates, etc., the Prescott ends up performing almost identically to the Northy.
 
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