Intel Pentium 4 660 and EE 3.73 GHz (page 8: Conclusion)

Conclusion

We were expecting a strong response from Intel with the recent rise of AMD. Apparently it won’t come from single core processors. Of course, the Pentium 4 6xx lineup brings its share of innovations as heat dissipation and power consumption is lower, and they benefit from EM64T and SpeedStep technology. At equivalent frequencies they also provide slightly better performances. Gains vary between +0 and 5%.

It is, however, important to keep in mind that Intel for this new processor line sells you a 6xx approximately for the same price of a 5xx, which is clocked 200 MHz higher. So the price gap is +25.8% at 3 GHz, +25.2% at 3.2 GHz, +44.2% at 3.4 GHz and +45.1% at 3.4 GHz! The 6xx 3.8 GHz version still isn’t available unlike the 5xx. The Pentium 4 570 is still today the most efficient standard processor. So we ask is this price difference justified?

Not really. Unfortunately, this is the law in the CPU market, whether it’s AMD or Intel. Intel sells us the additional 200 MHz (+5.9%) of the 560 for 50% more compared to the 550. It is the same for the 570 compared to a 560. The situation is identical at AMD with the additional 512 KB of the 4000+ compared to the 3800+.

We feel that, even if this price policy is common, it’s not right. Also, the SpeedStep is limited and doesn’t go as far as the AMD Cool’n’Quiet (doesn’t go below 2.8 GHz.). The EM64T is as interesting as the AMD64 and doesn’t deserve the additional cost as long as we won’t be able to measure the real user performance gains. In addition, in a couple of months the P4 5xx (the 5x1) will also feature the EM64T.

The Pentium 4 6xx processors aren’t so bad after all- they do have better performances than the Pentium 4 5xx – we just hope that Intel will quickly change their pricing policy. Of course they now feature several functions, which used to give advantages to AMD’s CPU, but the performance /price ratio is seriously reduced.

The Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73 GHz provides better performances than the previous version except with three applications. At times there were great performance improvements especially with video processing. Is this enough, though? Not really, because in addition, this processor needs a FSB1066 platform, which like the EE is very expensive. In the end it is just a P4 6xx which works at 14*266.

It is a lot of money, but it seems that this is the current leitmotiv for all these new processors. What a pity…