Pentium 4 3.06GHz Processor With Hyperthreading

Intel's Pentium 4 3.06GHz Processor
Intel breaks 3GHz barrier and  introduces Hyperthreading to the mainstream

By, Dave Altavilla
and Chris Angelini
November 14, 2002
 

While Intel has offered HT enabled CPUs in the Server Market, as part of their Xeon product offering, they haven't made it available in the Desktop Pentium 4, until this product launch.  Since this is a Desktop End User feature and benefit, you can be sure Intel is cooking up strong marketing campaigns to go along with this launch.  The real question is, are there applications and computing scenarios in which end users will be able to realize tangible increases in performance and overall system throughput, with this new technology?  We'll try to give you some insight here

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In between the marketing hype and product positioning, lies reality and real-world performance.  Intel is trying to drive the point home here that one processor can act as two or that there are two within one.  We'll see for ourselves in the benchmarks ahead.  However, obviously applications must be multi-threaded or users must be running multiple applications concurrently or "multi-tasking", in order for this technology to be fully exploited.

HotHardware's Test Systems Smokin'

Pentium 4 3.06GHz SiSoft Sandra Testing With and without Hyperthreading

As you'll note, Sandra's latest revision shows sizable gains with Hyperthreading enabled.  This is due to the fact that the CPU and Multimedia tests incorporated in these benchmarks, are now multi-threaded and take advantage of SMP capable platforms.  Here our Hyperthreaded P4 beats the theoretical performance of a 2.8GHz P4 with Hyperthreading, were that CPU actually available on the market.  What is interesting is that SiSoftware has these scores listed here yet Intel hasn't released HT enabled 2.8GHz chips.  Are we missing something here?  Rumors have circulated that lower clock speed P4 chips have the ability to run HT enabled.  However, Intel has assured us that they can "control availability of this feature" at the factory and that no other HT enabled P4s have been released.  In any event, the same performance scale holds true for the Multimedia tests.  Perhaps that is a bit of the obvious, so we'll dig in a little deeper in our next series of tests and see what this new core is capable of, at its outer limits.

Overclocking The 3.06GHz P4 - Vapochilled Hitting amazing clock speeds

We took this shiny new P4 3.06GHz chip and plugged it into the Vapochill rig we showed you not long ago here on HotHardware.  Here are the results...

4GHz!!!

3.77GHz CPU

3.77GHz MM

Now, don't get too excited about that 4GHz boot screen.  It's very real...  We were able to boot this new P4 at 4GHz.  However, the machine would reset itself after a few seconds of run time.  Incidentally, we did all our overclocking experiments on the Asus P4PE motherboard, that we reviewed for you here just recently.  We were actually able to boot WinXP successfully all the way up to 3.9GHz.  However, at that speed, the system was less than stable.  Full stability on the core, when Vapochilled down to about 4C at idle, was found at a 164MHz system bus for a total of 3.77GHz.  We were able to run Prime 95, at this point, for hours on end, with out a rounding error or crash of any kind.  This is not too shabby and shows you the potential of the P4 core going forward.

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