Intel quietly unleashes the power of Prescott

Marketing is a mysterious science. From a layperson’s perspective, you’d think it to be a science based on clear communication or at the very least communication aimed at cloaking confusion. But sometimes we laypeople just can’t keep up with true marketing professionals. Novell’s tradition of releasing new products with panther-like stealth is one example. But more to the point, for administrators of Wintel networks, Intel’s upcoming release of the Prescott CPUis another.

The confusion behind Prescott is that it’s being released in a manner befitting a chip that has only an incremental performance increase. Yet if we look closely, it’s quite a bit more. There’s enough “more” in there for some of us to wonder why this little piece of silicon isn’t being called Pentium 5.

A big reason for those musings is that unlike most incremental chip releases, Prescott comes equipped with a new instruction set. When the Pentium III’s SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) instruction set was replaced with the SSE2, Intel called that chip a Pentium 4. Prescott replaces SSE2 with SSE3, yet there isn’t a 5 in sight. The chip also has an instruction pipeline that’s been given the green light for speeds as fast as 5GHz with twice the cache of the present Pentium 4s. So where’s the parade?

For those interested in the science of marketing, here’s my near-worthless opinion: You can’t sell a Pentium 5 that’s running slower than a Pentium 4. Intel learned that lesson when it suffered some bad pressat the initial release of the Pentium 4, which soon after was getting trounced in performance benchmarks by muscle systems equipped with only Pentium IIIs.

Having written one or two of those articles myself, though, I thought we were pretty clear even then. Sure, the Pentium 4 was getting beat by the Pentium III out of the gate even though the Pentium 4 had the vaunted SSE2 instruction set and other goodies. But our benchmarks were application-based, and none of those applications had yet been optimized for SSE2 — and wouldn’t be for six months to a year and a half. So the P4 losing out to the PIII on PIII-based application tests really wasn’t much of a surprise. We’re in the same boat for Prescott and SSE3. You won’t see application-level support for SSE3 until 2005 at the earliest, with SSE3 going mainstream in late 2005 or even 2006.

So what’s an educated silicon marketing expert worried about bad press to do? Easy! Release the Prescott in a flurry of additional new chips and wait for the software market to catch up before letting the world know what’s out there. And what a flurry, by the way. Just as it’s getting ready to release Prescott, Intel is also pumping out 3.4GHz Pentium 4s.

For administrators buying new desktops, here’s a quick breakdown of the new chip horizon. The Pentium 4 will come out in two 3.4GHz flavors, the straight Pentium 4 3.4GHz and the 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, which is strutting around the gym with a rippling 2MB of additional L3 cache. Then comes Prescott, which will be released with a simple “E” designator. So look for 3.4E Pentium 4 if you’re interested in that one. This would be great if that’s all there was, but we’re not that lucky. Prescott will also be coming out in 3.2GHz, 3GHz, and two 2.8GHz versions (one running with an 800MHz front-side bus, the other with 533MHz). Yeah, purchasing should be fun for the foreseeable future.

There isn’t enough room to go into Prescott’s other inner advances, so let’s just say they include a much longer Netburst instruction pipeline and a new 90-nanometer process that allows not only more transistors, but higher clock cycles and a smaller die size to boot. So if you’re buying a new desktop today, do you care?

Only if you’re looking to really work those systems for more than a year and a half. Prescott is a complex new platform requiring additional consideration be paid to both cooling and power requirements, so system manufacturers will be charging a premium for these boxes. If you’re willing to make a long-term commitment to those machines, then go for it. But if you’re cycling your power users to new machines every year or so, then sticking to the Pentium 4 for the rest of the year is the better bet.