 It
was only two short months ago that we gave you our
hands on experiences with Intel's last flagship
processor for the PC, the 2.8GHz Pentium 4. As we
neared what seemed to be an almost mythical clock speed of
3GHz, we paused to wonder for a moment, whether or not the
average user could take advantage of the power of a Pentium
4 at this clock speed or the future Athlon XP3000+, for that
matter. Again, that pause we had was only for a moment
and we snapped back to reality with a hearty
Neanderthal grunt... arr arr!!!
More power! That's not to say however, that the target
audience for this class of processing power, is a bunch
of power hungry gear-heads like the HotHardware.Com Tech
Editorial Staff. On the contrary, there are many
mainstream environments and applications, that can obviously
benefit greatly from the type of leading edge processor
technology that Intel is bringing to the market on what
seems like more often than a quarterly basis.
In actuality, the convergence of
high quality audio, video and data streams into today's
modern Desktop environment, calls for ever increasing amounts
of horsepower. In many cases, the quality of end user
experience is directly proportional to the processing power
under the hood of the average Home or Corporate PC.
Additionally, more often then not, processing demands on the
host CPU, are being made from multiple applications at any
given time. Whether it be Multimedia processing along
with simultaneous end user sessions of email, desktop
publishing or spreadsheet analysis, the host CPU is
typically servicing multiple requests on its resources.
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Specifications of the Pentium 4
3.06GHz Processor |
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Hyperthreading and
just a few more MHz |
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- Clock Speed 3.06GHz
- 533MHz "Quad Pumped" Front Side Bus
- Hyperthreading Technology for increased performance
in Multi-tasking and Multi-threaded applications
- .13 micron manufacturing process
- 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
- Intel "NetBurst" micro-architecture
- Supported by the Intel® 850 and i845 chipsets, with
Hyperthreading support in i845E/PE/GE/GV/G and i850E chipsets.
- 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
- 1.525V operating voltage range
Theory and
realities of Intel's Hyperthreading:
This brings us to the latest
Intel innovation that has been unveiled for the Desktop
market, along with the launch of the 3.06GHz Pentium 4, "Hyperthreading".
Hyperthreading is an Intel invention for their processor
cores that allows the CPU to present the Operating System
with two "virtual" CPUs, each with its own set of resources.
This new technology allows multiple processing threads to run in parallel on a
single chip. Think of it as a "virtual SMP" (Symmetric
Multi-Processing) technology of sorts, only performed
all on one processor.
Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading - Two
separate architectural states represented for two paths to
processor resources
Requirements for
the HT enabled system:
- The upcoming Intel Pentium 4 processor at 3.06 GHz or
higher
- An Intel® chipset that supports HT Technology
- System BIOS that supports HT Technology and has it enabled
- An
operating system that includes optimizations for HT
Technology
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Task
Manager
With HT
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CPUID
With HT
| It should be
noted that currently, the only OS that supports
Hyperthreading, is Microsoft Windows XP. Even Windows
2000 or NT, are not officially supported for this
technology. Additionally, Intel recommends a clean
installation of WinXP, when migrating from a non HT enabled
system, so that XP can install its multi-processor kernel
properly. We performed clean installations in our
testing but were able to prove out that, WinXP will detect
the new virtual CPU upon boot up and after a reboot, Task
Manager will report the two virtual processors in the
control panel. Additional testing proved that we were
also realizing the benefits of Hyperthreading but more on
this later. In the Task Manager shot above, we were running
an MPEG to DIVX conversion on the test system. As you
can see, both CPUs were getting worked fairly hard.
More on HT, Test System Setup, Sandra and
Overclocking
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