LostCircuits takes a look at the 64-bit performance of Intel's Pentium4 600
Intel's entering the 64-bit market has been a bit of a clandestine cloak and dagger action, we did not even see the usual benchmarks in the marketing collateral. One of the bigger questions is whether it is as easy as sticking a few additional registers into a processor that was incepted at the end of the 16-bit era, produced to run at 32-bit and in its old days needs to adapt to the new 64-bit environment. Along these lines, as powerful as the 600 series may be with its double cache size, some initial reports claimed that the 64-bit performance more or less lags behind the 32-bit performance. Keep in mind that the benchmarks conducted were all comparing a WoW emulation against native 32-bit OS where driver variations alone may cause more variance in the results than the differences in operating systems. That aside, we have taken the P4-660 and the new ExtremeEdition and pitted them against the Socket940 Athlon64-FX53 in a true 64-bit benchmark. Some of the results may be surprising but they all show how much is to be gained from the overdue transition to 64 bit computing in the high-end desktop and workstation sector.Read more
