Strategic Marketing, most larger brand name companies have this function rolled up into a Marketing Manager's
responsibilities. Otherwise, in the case of Intel and
AMD, they actually have a Strategic Marketing team who's
sole purpose in life is to define the strategies and game
plans from a product and branding perspective, that will
maximize penetration within the customer base versus the
competition. Often times, Strategic Marketing means
trying to get an edge on the competition by learning
everything you can about them and leveraging
your own strategies, against their weaknesses as well as
strengths.
As you can image, both Intel
and AMD are masters of the fine art of strategic marketing.
Whether it be timely price cutting, aggressive branding
campaigns, or positioning specific performance data-points,
these two Silicon Valley veterans take no prisoners in their
battle for market supremacy. Last week,
AMD
launched their 2600+ Thoroughbred core based Athlon,
just as Intel was poised to unleash the Pentium 4 2.8GHz
processor, that we'll be showing you today. AMD got
word of Intel's pending release date and decided to unveil a
competitive product of their own, that flew right in the
face of Intel's new flagship CPU.
Even though
AMD
officially launched their new Athlon XP 2600+ part last
week, they are virtually impossible to get a hold of at this
point in time.
This "paper
launch", as some of the media has coined it, seemed to be
only a strategic marketing tactic, rather than officially
opening the production volume flood gates for their new
processor. Was it effective? Only time will
tell. However, although you can't actually find an
Athlon 2600+ on the net for sale just yet, you most
certainly already can find a 2.8GHz Pentium 4.
So with that said, we'll
spare you the strategic marketing here and get down to some
cold hard benchmarks on the new and readily available 2.8GHz
Pentium 4.
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Specifications of the Pentium 4B Processor |
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533MHz System Bus and
a core clock up to 2.8GHz |
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- Available at 2.26GHz, 2.4GHz, 2.53, 2.66 and
2.80GHz speeds
- 533MHz "Quad Pumped" Front Side Bus
- Based upon Intel?s 0.13 micron manufacturing process
- Now built on 300mm wafers for 2X die out per wafer
and lower cost
- 512K on chip, Full Speed L2 Cache
- Rapid Execution Engine - ALU clocked at 2X frequency
of core
- 128bit Floating Point/Multimedia unit
- "Hyper Pipelined" Technology for extremely high
clock speeds
- Featuring the Intel "NetBurst" micro-architecture
- Supported by the Intel® 850 and i845 chipsets, as
well as other chipsets from SiS and VIA
- Fully compatible with existing Intel
Architecture-based software
- Internet Streaming SIMD Extensions 2
- Intel® MMX? media enhancement technology
- Memory cacheability up to 4 GB of addressable memory
space and system memory scalability up to 64 GB of
physical memory
- Support for uni-processor designs
- 1.5V operating voltage range
Well, here we
are again, only a few months down the road, since the
Pentium 4 Northwood's launch, and we're back at for a
third time, with the processor that seemingly has an almost
infinitely scalable clock speed. We get the sneaking
suspicion that if Intel decided they wanted to, we would
have been reviewing the 3GHz model. There's really not
much need for us to recap the architecture of the new 2.8GHz
P4. Suffice it to say that the core hasn't changed but
the "Hyper Pipelined" architecture of the P4, allows it to
hit clock speeds like no other processor in the world.
The physical
attributes of the core and package haven't changed a bit
either. The shot in the middle does however show
Intel's relatively new 300mm wafer size. Can you say
dinner plate? One of these wafers holds about 470
Pentium 4 dice. Thermally this core seems almost as if
Intel pulled out a few tricks to get the operating temps
down. There is a new core stepping on this P4 but we
were told it shouldn't have much of an affect on
operating temperature. Let's fire it up and show you
what we saw....
The Setup, Processor ID, Thermals and Overclocking
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