Author: Nolan Denson
Date: 22:35:42 03/29/04
Go up one level in this thread
The improvements seen above aren’t bad at all, however remember that this sort of a reduction is necessary in order to make up for the fact that we’re now dealing with a 55% longer pipeline with Prescott. The areas that received the largest improvement (> 10% fewer mispredicted branches) were in 176.gcc, 197.parser, 252.eon, 253.perlbmk and 254.gap. The 176.gcc test is a compiler test, which the Pentium 4 has clearly lagged behind the Athlon 64 in. 197.parser is a word processing test, also an area where the Pentium 4 has done poorly in the past thanks to branch-happy integer code. 252.eon is a ray tracer, and we already know about 253.perlbmk; improvements in 254.gap could have positive ramifications for Prescott’s performance in HPC applications as it simulates performance in math intensive distributed data computation. The benefit of improvements under the hood like the branch prediction algorithms we’ve discussed here is that they are taken advantage of on present-day software, with no recompiling and no patches. Keep this in mind when we investigate performance later on. We’ll close this section off with another interesting fact – although Prescott features a lot of new improvements, there are other improvements included in Prescott that were only introduced in later revisions of the Northwood core. Not all Northwood cores are created equal, but all of the enhancements present in the first Hyper Threading enabled Northwoods are also featured in Prescott.
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