Was pentium 4 an over engineered CPU?

[mclaren85]

My first pc back in 2005 was powered by intel p4 3.00ghz CPU. I don't know if I'm exxegareting but I remember it was so smooth and quick CPU even for today's standards. The system load speed, browser responsivity was so good that I've never seen anything like this back then. Was this CPU mistakenly built far too powerful than anything known or over engineered or I'm mistaken or the windows xp was very light for pentium 4?

 

[Dr. Dro]

The Pentium 4 was actually... rather poorly performing compared to the AMD Athlon 64 CPUs of the time, especially when compared to the Athlon 64 FX or X2 (dual core) models. NetBurst architecture had long pipelines and tried to make up for it with high clock speeds, which in turn created a lot of heat. AMD would then make the same mistake almost 10 years later with the "AMD FX" product line (Bulldozer and Piledriver), which is bad for much of the same reasons, plus a few others specific to it. I used to have a P4 511 some 20 years ago. Sorry computer that one was... but I learned a lot with it.

You might have fond memories because your standards were a lot lower, easier to be happy that way... and also likely because Windows XP wasn't bloated trash.

 

[amit_talkin]

Prescott was the first time I got introduced to "CPU Overheating" term lol.

 

[marios15]

Windows XP and 7 are extremely responsive compared to W8 and newer versions
No desktop compositor and overlays, the difference is huge when I dualboot from Linux to W10, even typing text has a delay compared to Linux or W7

 

[Ruru]

HT helped a lot during later years with the singlecore P4.

 

[Onasi]

NetBurst wasn’t overly engineered. It was actually absolute dogshit in many regards and there is a very good reason why Core went back to PIII way of doing things and left the NetBurst era behind. In terms of responsiveness, XP ran just fine on a 800Mhz PIII too, so I wouldn’t say that’s an indication of anything.

 

[Apocalypsee]

Pentium 4 at 3GHz no matter what it's core, be it Northwood or Prescott was plenty fast for XP because the requirement to run XP was 233MHz CPU so it's not 'over engineered' per se. But Pentium 4 was engineered for clock speed with deep pipelines and only comes to reasonable performance at that clock, early lower clock iteration is pretty poor.

 

[Aken Bosch]

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.

 

[marios15]

The weirdest part about that era I remember was that Windows and MS office menu drop-down animations were smooth on Pentium but horribly laggy on Athlon XP/64

 

[wolf]

Prescott was the first time I got introduced to "CPU Overheating" term lol.

I remember PresHOT lol.

Back in the day I had a Northwood celeron 2.4 that oc'd well, but a later Athlon Xp Barton core was considerably faster.

 

[Ruru]

Pentium 4 at 3GHz no matter what it's core, be it Northwood or Prescott was plenty fast for XP because the requirement to run XP was 233MHz CPU so it's not 'over engineered' per se. But Pentium 4 was engineered for clock speed with deep pipelines and only comes to reasonable performance at that clock, early lower clock iteration is pretty poor.

Wonder how badly XP would've ran with a Pentium/K6 @ 233MHz

I'd say that a P4 2GHz/AXP 2000+ & 512MB RAM was the real minimum for non-sluggish usage.

 

[Outback Bronze]

Back in the day I had a Northwood celeron 2.4 that oc'd well, but a later Athlon Xp Barton core was considerably faster.

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??

 

[Shihab]

That's not how I recall these days.
Some things were faster, sure. Input lag was low, afaik. But most of computing was bottlenecked by storage and network, both which were horribly slow.

Comparison is complex due to software side changes. UI elements did lack the frills they have today. Switching two frames in a buffer is sure going to feel snappier than than playing a complex animation or effect.
The fact that many -if not most- applications today are built on top of some atrocious framework or the other makes things more complicated.

 

[Onasi]

Actual overheating anecdote - in 2006 I was still running a Northwood P4HT. It actually ran fine for years under a stock cooler (not the greatest idea in retrospect, granted). So there I was, trying to play freshly released Dark Messiah. It wasn’t running great, being fair (I was running a 6600 at the time), but it did run. Then, and I remember this vividly, during Chapter 3 where you chase after the ghoul who stole the crystal through the rooftops, my PC just shuts down. Okay, well, no biggie. Reset. Shut down in game even faster now. Welp. Turns out, one of the plastic pin legs on the cooler gave up the ghost and it wasn’t making perfect contact, so the CPU was reaching thermal shutdown from anything that wasn’t just sitting on the desktop. And even then I think it eventually got hot enough. So yeah, that’s my P4 overheat story. To be fair, I replaced the cooler with some Zalman and it worked fine till next year when I rebuilt with a C2D and a GTX 8800.

 

[AusWolf]

My Athlon 64 ran miles around any Pentium 4 at lower clocks and producing much less heat.

I think what you're describing is the effect of owning only one PC, being happy with its performance, and having nothing else to compare it to except for your own needs.

 

[wolf]

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??

I'm trying to remember which Barton I even had, but the celeron had a low FSB and iirc it had bugger all cache too. I remember having g a lot of fun with it tho!

As for cache, yeah am I think of the 5775c too? That was a niche little ripper Intel just seemed to never want to repeat.

 

[Wirko]

Here comes Northwood, which switched to SD/DDRAM architecture at higher frequency too (2.4 GHz became quite popular).

I have nothing but good memories of my Northwood 2.4, which I used at work from 2003 until 2015 for non-demanding development work. Fast and cool (and I had a C2D at home to compare), and it ran Office 2010 perfectly well. The entire PC consumed 65 W at idle, which at the time was considered frugal.

Some desktop P4 CPUs were even used in notebooks, although I don't remember which ones, and at what clocks.

 

[mclaren85]

Well I think CPU power/os bloatness ratio (don't know how to say so I made it up this term) was very high at that specific time. Nowadays however, CPU/os ratio is decreasing each day.

 

[AusWolf]

As for cache, yeah am I think of the 5775c too? That was a niche little ripper Intel just seemed to never want to repeat.

It was probably too expensive to manufacture at that time. I would have loved to get my hands on one, though!

Well I think CPU power/os bloatness ratio (don't know how to say so I made it up this term) was very high at that specific time. Nowadays however, CPU/os ratio is decreasing each day.

Not with Linux it isn't.
The load on my 7800X3D at idle is less than 1% - and I've got Steam, Heroic, Chrome and Discord running in the background. I've just started a file transfer to a USB stick, but my usage is still below 2%.

 

[Onasi]

Not with Linux it isn't.

Linux is bloated too. Even BSD is. All is bloat. Reject computers. Return to pen and paper.

The load on my 7800X3D at idle is less than 1% - and I've got Steam, Heroic, Chrome and Discord running in the background.

Achievable on a properly setup 11 too. An irrelevant statistic in practice.

 

[mclaren85]

It was probably too expensive to manufacture at that time. I would have loved to get my hands on one, though!


Not with Linux it isn't.
The load on my 7800X3D at idle is less than 1% - and I've got Steam, Heroic, Chrome and Discord running in the background. I've just started a file transfer to a USB stick, but my usage is still below 2%.

Which version of Linux are you referring to? Also XP is very light on the HDDs, whereas win 10 depends heavily on disk usage. Don't know what kind of big chunk data it is being moved every second.

 

[AusWolf]

Linux is bloated too. Even BSD is. All is bloat. Reject computers. Return to pen and paper.

Our entire modern society is bloated. But let's not stray too far from the topic.

Achievable on a properly setup 11 too. An irrelevant statistic in practice.

It isn't "achievable" on Linux. It's the norm.

Which version of Linux are you referring to? Also XP is very light on the HDDs, whereas win 10 depends heavily on disk usage. Don't know what kind of big chunk data it is being moved every second.

I haven't seen any version of Linux that is as bloated as Windows 10 is (I never tried 11, and probably won't ever). I'm currently using Bazzite, a gaming-oriented Fedora spin-off.

Edit: Windows 10 has a buttload of stuff reading and writing data all the time. Disk indexing, defragmenter, Defender, Windows Update, compatibility telemetry, etc. Linux has none of that.

 

[R-T-B]

windows xp was very light for pentium 4?

This, essentially. XP could run on a Pentium III reasonably well so of course a Pentium 4 was great for it.

 

[Macro Device]

Reject computers. Return to pen and paper.

At least this will help with a hacking threat.

 

[S-TKUC]

I also had a PC with a Pentium 4.
I remember the ATX 4 pin connector melting.

I was satisfied with the performance of the Pentium 4 at the time.
The Core 2 Duo that came out later was more powerful, but at the same time I switched from Windows XP to Vista.
As for Windows Vista... there's nothing I need to say.

As a result, I had the impression that the Pentium 4 was more comfortable to use until Windows 7 came out.