Northwood vs Prescott

[Claudehl]

Working on old computer and have old question which I don't know
enough to decide. I'm hoping someone will know this:

A computer running with :

Pentium 4 Northwood, 512 KB cache but 800 MHz FSB

or

Pentium 4 Prescott, 1 MB cache but 533 MHz FSB ?

At same clock speed of 2.4 GHz, which computer will be the fastest
overall?

Thanks,
Claude

 

[Del Cecchi]

Working on old computer and have old question which I don't know
enough to decide. I'm hoping someone will know this:

A computer running with :

Pentium 4 Northwood, 512 KB cache but 800 MHz FSB

or

Pentium 4 Prescott, 1 MB cache but 533 MHz FSB ?

At same clock speed of 2.4 GHz, which computer will be the fastest
overall?

Thanks,
Claude

Running what software? If it fits in the 1MB but not the 512KB the
answer is obvious.

 

[Claudehl]

Pretty unlikely, of course.


The Northwood is generally faster, at any given clock, even if the FSB
was the same.

Thanks. Seems to run cooler too.

Claude

 

[Nate Edel]

Thanks. Seems to run cooler too.

If the FSBs were reversed, I suspect the Prescott would be faster: Pentium 4
chips of any generation are much more sensitive to FSB speed differences
than either P3s were or Core2s are.

 

[johannes]

Thanks. Seems to run cooler too.

Claude

Yes, Northwood ~70W, Prescott ~90W. Prescott increased the number of
pipeline stages from around 20 to around 30, but did some branch
prediction improvements to try to compensate for longer pipeline.
All in all, Prescott was a dog.