The first Pentium4 EE benchmarks

HERE THEY ARE - the first set of benchmarks for the new beast on the block, the humongous XeonMP Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor, with a unique x17 default multiplier for a 3.4 GHz frequency (tells you a lot about the possible announced speeds).

Johan & the gang at Ace did a nice, comprehensive quickie, and the results are exactly as I noted in my timewarped article on P4 EE just before Burns's IDF speech, stating to "expect speedups between 2% and 20% depending on the app" at a given clock speed, of course. The Aces got between 2% and 15% roughly, so we were on target!

So, despite the fast 800 MHz FSB and dual-channel DDR400, a large cache still brings noticeable performance improvement. Does it mean that a faster FSB (say 1066 MHz throughput) with correspondingly faster DDR533 RAM would help as well? Maybe - it seems the jobs don't fit that well into a 512K L2 cache of the "common" P4 flavour.

For Ace's early deflowering of P4 EE, and before they come out with a comparison between this thing and two brand new CPUs from "another major CPU vendor" on 23rd (I got one of them too), look at their quickie review, here. µ