Intel's Pentium 4 3.06GHz: Hyper-Threading on Desktops

Final Words

At the beginning of this year Intel had just introduced their 0.13-micron Northwood core at 2/2.2GHz and now, 10 months later, Intel has kept their promise of scaling up clock speeds faster than before as we finish reviewing their 3.06GHz Pentium 4. As you read this, Intel is sampling their 90nm parts, readying for a 2H-03 launch of the interim successor to the Pentium 4 - Prescott. Prescott will bring us a larger L2 cache, new instructions and it will continue to offer the Hyper-Threading technology we've evaluated today.

We have to hand it to Intel, we honestly expected Hyper-Threading to be a big flop initially on the desktop because of losses in performance. It seems as if Intel has worked out virtually all of the issues we ran into when we first looked at Hyper-Threading on the Xeon processors several months ago. With the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 you thankfully won't even have to worry about whether you should enable Hyper-Threading or not, the technology does more good than harm.

Hyper-Threading in its current form is very much an infant technology, the potential for it is huge and it can grow into something much larger than what we see here today. It is impressive that we are able to see some serious performance gains in encoding and 3D rendering applications, as well as in isolated multitasking scenarios but the true benefit of Hyper-Threading comes much further down the road. With compiler optimizations and programmers developing with Hyper-Threading in mind, we'll see much more dramatic performance increases in the future.

Today, Hyper-Threading still comes at a fairly high cost as you have to purchase Intel's flagship Pentium 4 processor to get the technology. The beauty of it is that at < 5% die cost, Intel won't hesitate to migrate the technology across their entire line of CPUs. What will be interesting to see is whether or not the value Celeron line of processors gets the technology as well.

The 3.06GHz Pentium 4 is the first step in a long road ahead for Intel as they embark on a quest to increase Thread Level Parallelism after extracting parallelism from instructions for the past decade...