Was pentium 4 an over engineered CPU?

[Ripcord]

The P4 chips architecture turned out to be flawed. they were designed with the intention to eventually run at around 40Ghz but Intel soon found out that much more than 4Ghz would case the chips to degrade and fail.

 

[mechtech]

I would say over over-clocked perhaps

 

[marios15]

I dislike generic statements.

Not every linux kernel was build for performance. Not every Desktop Envrionment, DE, is fast. DE = graphical user interface for the graphical X-Server so you can use your webbrowser, spreadsheet, music software and such with a mouse. Not in text mode of course.

KDE and Gnome Desktop environment are especially bloated and slow.

You may try a slim Desktop Environment with bare minimum first. I do use the same windows key combinations from Windows XP for certain tasks.
my config file for i3wm.org has only a few lines. Only a few functionality. I do not need the 80% more feature e.g. Windows 11 pro 24h2 deliveres for a working computer for the basic task to do work. the browser and spreadsheet and text program and text editor are the same. The file system does not really matter. I also see it quite easily on the RAM usage for a Desktop Environment. Or the packages which have to be build from scratch for certain Desktop Environments.

I'm also using xfce but KDE is more user friendly(apple or windows-like) and the compositor can be disabled which is the #1 source of input latency


To add on the discussion, I found Athlon 64 on Win2000 being extremely snappy and actually scored higher in most benchmarks than XP (I also tried xp x64 but it had lots of crashes)
I remember I could get XP down to 11 running processes including taskmgr
For comparison W10 below 50 is tough to achieve (even with forcing single svchost for multiple services) which even if nothing is executing there will be some "noise" here and there

 

[Princess Garnet]

I still kinda wanted to try my hand at overclocking a Cedar Mill. Those were pretty wild, 65 nm P4's. Unfortunately my S775 boards are all G41 trash that die at 340 FSB, most I managed was 3.5 on a QX9650 because unlocked multiplier

I had one, but I never used it for any meaningful time.

I had an E8600 at the time, and my parents PC happened to have a Pentium 4 641, so when they upgraded, they let me have it and I decided to try it in my PC. Being 64-bit allowed me to just drop it into the same Windows installation.

In my (admittedly short) time with it, it felt very snappy in Windows. I remember thinking "is this really a Pentium 4"? Of course things like games and any real measurements would probably tell a different story, but it felt much faster than all of the socket 478 Pentium 4s I recall using before. I was using it on a PC with 8 GB RAM under Windows 7 (but still on an HDD), and I did overclock it, which raised the FSB. I recall that the Pentium 4 was a bandwidth starved architecture, so raising that may have helped a lot.

I think I hit the same upper 4 GHz wall around 4.75 GHz or 4.8 GHz that I did with my E8600, so perhaps I had a limitation due to the motherboard or RAM (or cooling?). I even gave the Pentium 4 quite a lot of voltage, not caring if it degraded, trying to get 5 GHz but I couldn't.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Yup, Cedar was much better but it came way too late. You can use those with DDR3, too, if you have a newer motherboard. Way better than it's given credit for, though, being honest, it's not saying much, Conroe would walk all over it anyway. The E8600 is awesome, I have one here, though it hasn't seen much use lately.

 

[freeagent]

I have one here, though it hasn't seen much use lately.

My DDR2 Rampage Formula loves that chip. I had that CPU in ES version, but someone stole it.. so I don't have it anymore.

Good times though!

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Another Netbust fun fact, when Apple announced it was transitioning from PPC to x86, the dev kits were 3.6 GHz Prescotts stuffed into a Mac Pro case. The first Macs to actually launch were based on Core (Merom and Yonah), but I guess they weren’t ready yet. Apple never shipped a Netburst product for sale. They rode the best years Intel had to offer, that’s for sure.

I'm also using xfce but KDE is more user friendly(apple or windows-like) and the compositor can be disabled which is the #1 source of input latency


To add on the discussion, I found Athlon 64 on Win2000 being extremely snappy and actually scored higher in most benchmarks than XP (I also tried xp x64 but it had lots of crashes)
I remember I could get XP down to 11 running processes including taskmgr
For comparison W10 below 50 is tough to achieve (even with forcing single svchost for multiple services) which even if nothing is executing there will be some "noise" here and there

Ah yes, the killing of MS services was essential in the single core days. It was the first stop right after a clean install. I also recall how important getting the right on-board sound codec chip was too. Certain ones had less overhead. Ag the good ol days where scrounging for resources was key. These days I don’t care what sound chip my board has, as I’m usually using whatever audio passes through a Radeon over HDMI or DP. And the only services I kill are the nuisance ones like Copilot and widgets and stuff.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

Aw what the hell. Here's a P4 Northy 133 old screen shot.

 

[Marcus L]

Aw what the hell. Here's a P4 Northy 133 old screen shot.

View attachment 387704

Psychopathic traits running the task bar on the side

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Aw what the hell. Here's a P4 Northy 133 old screen shot.

View attachment 387704

Ag yea, the Fisher-Price default XP theme. Their Media Center theme was the best of XP though.

 

[AusWolf]

I dislike generic statements.

Not every linux kernel was build for performance. Not every Desktop Envrionment, DE, is fast. DE = graphical user interface for the graphical X-Server so you can use your webbrowser, spreadsheet, music software and such with a mouse. Not in text mode of course.

KDE and Gnome Desktop environment are especially bloated and slow.

You may try a slim Desktop Environment with bare minimum first. I do use the same windows key combinations from Windows XP for certain tasks.
my config file for i3wm.org has only a few lines. Only a few functionality. I do not need the 80% more feature e.g. Windows 11 pro 24h2 deliveres for a working computer for the basic task to do work. the browser and spreadsheet and text program and text editor are the same. The file system does not really matter. I also see it quite easily on the RAM usage for a Desktop Environment. Or the packages which have to be build from scratch for certain Desktop Environments.

Even KDE is a lot less bloated than Windows.

Yup, Cedar was much better but it came way too late. You can use those with DDR3, too, if you have a newer motherboard. Way better than it's given credit for, though, being honest, it's not saying much, Conroe would walk all over it anyway. The E8600 is awesome, I have one here, though it hasn't seen much use lately.

I had an E8400. Wolfdale was a great chip indeed.

 

[Fouquin]

NetBurst wasn’t overly engineered.

It really was, though. Willamette was an abysmally large die with around a quarter of its logic massively scaled up; mostly being the ALU pipelines, trace BTB, cache lines, and uOP decoder. The trace cache alone is an obscenely overbuilt thing that required a new prediction unit and prefetch logic that wasn't required on P6 or Athlon. The whole core is insanely complex for the actual performance that it can achieve. Willamette was expected to be an already quite large 170mm^2 die, and ended up actually being a gargantuan (for its time) 217mm^2. Athlon (TBird), by comparison, was 120mm^2. Part of this was Intel's decision to not use local interconnect libraries for SRAM blocks, which inflated cache area size by quite a lot. Another part is that every permutation of NetBurst contains the necessary duplicated logic to enable HyperThreading; but it remained disabled in Willamette because of various issues in implementation. Foster, which shares Willamette's core design, did ship with HyperThreading enabled.

You can find a lot of deep information regarding how overbuilt (and underspec) Pentium 4 was in this documentation.

Another source of detailed information here.

Also here.

Finally, MPR's preview report archived here.

3ghz maybe a little more.

Northwood was shipping at up to 3.4GHz stock, most of those later stepping chips can reach 3.8GHz, some 4GHz below SNDS danger voltage. Similar for Gallatin; Northwood with L3 still intact, 3.2-3.4 top end and 3.9GHz possible. Gallatin Xeons are wondrous things as well as they frequently do 3.6-3.8GHz at significantly lower voltages (1.55-1.62v instead of 1.7-1.75v).

 

[ShrimpBrime]

Don't hhave a ton of useful information on the platform. Just more eye candies.

This is another 2.4ghz Northy, 200fsb clocked to 275fsb!!

Oh and ah! XD

 

[chrcoluk]

I skipped pentium 4 thankfully, I think I was on AMD in that era. Also missed AMD FX thankfully as well.

A rough memory, but order might be wrong.

486 dx2, 486/586 dx4 (cant remember if this was cryix or AMD), pentium 166 mmx, pentium 3 (slot based cpu, remember was weird), amd thunder bird in the era when they put intel clock speed in name I had 2200+ model (this is the hottest CPU I have ever used, in summer was desk fan blowing into open case), amd 64 3500+ this was a very good chip and I felt AMD made massive strides over the previous one, intel 6420 core2duo, (intel made big strides with this, and I think was after pentium 4), intel i5 750, haswell 4670k (i5 750 stayed in use as second PC), intel i5 8600k, amd 2600x (second PC upgrade from i5 750), intel 9900k (main pc upgrade from 8600k, this ran much more efficient than 8600k, clearly a better binned chip, was a workhorse for lots of cpu encoding), amd 5600g (upgrade from 2600x, both chips are efficient, but 5600g seems really optimised for the workload of the machine), 13700k (main PC, its a warm chip for sure, but not as hot as that amd 2200+, although the cooler I have now is likely much better than one I had all those years ago).

 

[lexluthermiester]

Was pentium 4 an over engineered CPU?

Short answer? Yes. It's "Netburst" instruction pipeline was WAY over engineered.

 

[Ruru]

I had a P4 HT 3.0/800 FSB OC to 3.75ghz and my mates 2.5ghz Barton did a little underperform against it. Did have pretty similar performance though.

It's interesting, the P4EE included 2mb L3 cache which made it pull ahead even more so in games. It was kind of like the X3D's of today. I wonder why they didn't keep it up??

The P4EE was practically a Xeon, just repackaged to a consumer socket. That explains the L3.

 

[eidairaman1]

Psychopathic traits running the task bar on the side

Takes one to know one

The P4EE was practically a Xeon, just repackaged to a consumer socket. That explains the L3.

I had a Gallatin Core 3.4 (Northwood Extreme) in a Laptop,-Dell XPS Gen 1/Inspiron 9100. Never overheated and it gamed fine, unlike todays mobiles which are steaming piles of shit.


The P4 423 Williamette 1.7GHz 400 FSB gave me no issues using a ECS P4VXMS but the P4 478 533 FSB Northwood 2.4GHz with a Asus P4S8X motherboard was a nightmare, it made me switch to 462 AMD which was smooth sailing.

 

[LabRat 891]

I had a Gallatin Core 3.4 (Northwood Extreme) in a Laptop,-Dell XPS Gen 1/Inspiron 9100. Never overheated and it gamed fine,

Yet another example of, moar cache, moar betterer.

unlike todays mobiles which are steaming piles of shit.

Thermal Budget this and Boost Period that...
I miss laptops that were engineered to sustain 100% load, for as long as the user needed it to. Admittedly, most consumer models were not capable of that (by the time I was messing w/ computers) but... From what I'd gathered when I was looking for an older-newish 'professional' laptop, even a lot of "mobile workstations" can't sustain performance.

The P4 423 Williamette 1.7GHz 400 FSB gave me no issues using a ECS P4VXMS but the P4 478 533 FSB Northwood 2.4GHz with a Asus P4S8X motherboard was a nightmare, it made me switch to 462 AMD which was smooth sailing.

Researching those boards+chipsets*, along with the discussion surrounding the massive changes made from Northwood->Prescott
is making me realize that "Pentium 4" likely has a similar story behind its (internal) naming as MSFT's (Direct)X-box

Pentium 4X, named after the Pentium-descended front side bus, quad-pumped?


*IIRC, VIA was more than a bit miffed about the drama surrounding the 'closure' of the now-propietary Intel P4 Platform to VIA's x86 CPUs.
VIA marketed its re-worked Intel-compatible Chipsets with the prefix "P4X"

 

[eidairaman1]

Yet another example of, moar cache, moar betterer.

Thermal Budget this and Boost Period that...
I miss laptops that were engineered to sustain 100% load, for as long as the user needed it to. Admittedly, most consumer models were not capable of that (by the time I was messing w/ computers) but... From what I'd gathered when I was looking for an older-newish 'professional' laptop, even a lot of "mobile workstations" can't sustain performance.


Researching those boards+chipsets*, along with the discussion surrounding the massive changes made from Northwood->Prescott
is making me realize that "Pentium 4" likely has a similar story behind its (internal) naming as MSFT's (Direct)X-box

Pentium 4X, named after the Pentium-descended front side bus, quad-pumped?


*IIRC, VIA was more than a bit miffed about the drama surrounding the 'closure' of the now-propietary Intel P4 Platform to VIA's x86 CPUs.
VIA marketed its re-worked Intel-compatible Chipsets with the prefix "P4X"

Yeah that Chipset was P4X266A on the ECS board, AMD Chipsets were KT266 etc etc.

SIS648 was on the Asus board, it was so bad it made me swear them off until AM3.

 

[biffzinker]

The P4 chips architecture turned out to be flawed. they were designed with the intention to eventually run at around 40Ghz but Intel soon found out that much more than 4Ghz would case the chips to degrade and fail.

10 GHz was the target clock speed Intel was shooting for.

Well, Wilamette was an abysmal flop, a 1.7 GHz which wasn't able to beat a P3@1 GHz. Rambus was also extremely expensive.
Here comes Northwood, which switched to SD/DDRAM architecture at higher frequency too (2.4 GHz became quite popular).
Then they HAD to an released Prescott, which was a furnace in its own right.
After that some failed D models. So no, P4 was in reality a biiiig fumble, hence they switched to the Core architecture designed by Intel in Israel for mobile. From then on, well, we know how it pan out.

Part of the reason Willamette didn’t do so well was the 256 KB of L2 Cache because when Northwood came out with 512 KB it was game on for performance.

Yeah depends on the service pack of course, but even by the end of its life I remember running it quasi effectively on a 400ish MHz Pentium II lol.


He's probably remembering the post-northwood monsters. Prescot?


For me it was Westmere or Nehalem... of course thats because its what I had at the time (for a very long time as it were). YMMV.

The Pentium M should be considered a worthy contender as a successful hit which leads into the Core 2 Duo they were overclocking champs like the 2500K/2600K.

 

[LabRat 891]

10 GHz was the target clock speed Intel was shooting for.

I remember those statements and rumors...

Part of the reason Willamette didn’t do so well was the 256 KB of L2 Cache because when Northwood came out with 512 KB it was game on for performance.

Only time 'lacking cache' has done well, was with 'extreme' clockspeeds. IIRC the cut-down Celerons could OC to the moon.

The Pentium M should be considered a worthy contender as a successful hit which leads into the Core 2 Duo they were overclocking champs like the 2500K/2600K.

Intel actively held the Pentium M and Core Duo away from the Desktop space. It was legitimately the better CPU, through and through.
I still hope for the chance to play around w/ a Core Solo or Pentium M on a '478' board.

 

[AusWolf]

I had a Gallatin Core 3.4 (Northwood Extreme) in a Laptop,-Dell XPS Gen 1/Inspiron 9100. Never overheated and it gamed fine, unlike todays mobiles which are steaming piles of shit.

That's because modern laptops sacrifice cooling on the altar of being thin, even gaming ones. That's why when someone asks me for a recommendation on a gaming laptop, I just say "don't".

 

[biffzinker]

That's because modern laptops sacrifice cooling on the altar of being thin, even gaming ones. That's why when someone asks me for a recommendation on a gaming laptop, I just say "don't".

A gaming laptop should be synonymous with get a DTR laptop since stressing the CPU/GPU does nothing for portability while on battery.

 

[AusWolf]

A gaming laptop should be synonymous with get a DTR laptop since stressing the CPU/GPU does nothing for portability while on battery.

What's a DTR laptop?

Anyway, battery power is one thing, but cooling is a bigger problem, imo. You either get your usual thin and light machine with powerful hardware that runs at its thermal limit all the time, or if you're lucky, you might find a rare chunky boy, but then, portability suffers. Utterly pointless, imo. Gaming is for your home, so you're much better off building a gaming desktop, and getting a cheap netbook for being on the run.

 

[Ruru]

What's a DTR laptop?

Desktop replacement.