Intel Pentium 4 2.2A (Northwood)

Author : Wayne Date : 4th March 2002

...Product	Pentium4 2.2A
...Manufacturer	Intel
...Supplier	Intel
...Price	£557.00 approx @ Scan

 

 

 

Performance :

Test system 1 :

Intel Pentium 4 Northwood 2.2GHz
Shuttle AK40R VIA P4X255 (DDR) Motherboards
256MB Kingmax PC2100 DDR Memory
Creative Labs GeForce 3 Ti500
Fujitsu 40GB ATA-100 HDD
Windows XP Pro

Test system 2 :

AMD Athlon XP2000+
Epox 8KHA+ VIA KT266A (DDR) Motherboards
256MB Kingmax PC2100 DDR Memory
Creative Labs GeForce 3 Ti500
Fujitsu 40GB ATA-100 HDD
Windows XP Pro

SiSoft Sandra Benchmark Results :

SiSoft's Sandra is a purely synthetic benchmark, and while its results don't necessarily pan out in real world applications it's always a good place to start. It does give an indication of individual strengths and weaknesses although in general use there's much more to an efficient architecture than can be demonstrated this way.

Using the CPU arithmetic benchmark we see how the Athlon's integer performance outshines that of the Northwood. On the other hand we see how, even allowing for the XP's added SSE instructions, the Northwood has significantly more floating point grunt at its disposal. Of course this is only a factor when using SSE optimised code but with both AMD and Intel now able to handle SSE I doubt it'll be long before we see it incorporated into a good number of titles. Intel took a gamble on building its FPU primarily around SSE and it's beginning to look like that gamble may be about to pay off.

Running the multimedia bench tells a very similar story. Here again we see the XP take a lead in integer performance while once again the Northwood runs off with the floating point title.

And as you might expect, when we look at memory bandwidth the Northwood simply owns the XP. We may gripe about non SSE floating point performance and complain that pipeline is too deep but when it comes to memory architecture the Pentium 4 is king.

 

 

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