Pentium D 940 having a clock rate of 3.2 GHz and total L2-cache size of 4 MB in a final effort has
managed to outrun Pentium E2140 with a frequency of 1.6 GHz and total L2-cache of 1 MB. At that, it has still failed to surpass
Pentium E2160 (1.8 GHz / 1 MB) and Athlon X2 BE-2350 (2.1 GHz / 1 MB). Apparently, not all was right with the architecture.
"The highest tree has the greatest fall" - is an epitaph that comes to mind.
Supposed power consumption
Pentium D 805 is unique in being not only based on NetBurst, but also on 90 nm technology.
However, even a 65-nanometer process hasn't allowed processors based on NetBurst core
to beat anyone, apart from themselves. As a whole, it is clear that in power consumption Pentium D lose to both
AMD K8 core (in all of its numerous modifications) and Intel Core. It would have been overlooked, surely... had they demonstrated
higher than the other architectures' performance. Yet, when a minus in one area adds to a minus in another
it is hard to reach anything other than the objective verdict, no matter how much one would like to.
Conclusions
What does it all boil down to? Pentium D, as a processor class, has performed quite well in CAD/CAE subtest,
more or less adequately in OCR and data compression subtests (thanks to a gigantic advantage in cache size over
the other competitors in the latter case), and very successfully (in regards to price) in Adobe Photoshop CS2 subtest.
On one hand, it's not so bad for a yesterday's architecture. On the other hand, this result can be considered good only for a yesterday's architecture,
because superiority of both Intel's new and AMD's old architecture is apparent in the rest of subtests and requires no comments.
That is, to NetBurst's credit we may add that currently there is still a certain number of wide-spread software
for which Pentium D family can be an appropriate choice (not so much in terms of pure performance, as in price-performance ratio).
You don't have to be a genius to predict that with time this range of software will continue to narrow down. And you don't have to be
a professional analytic to realize that of the "old" architectures (which in this case include not only Intel NetBurst, but also
AMD K8) AMD K8 is the more suited to present day reality. We merely obtained a numeric confirmation of what was intuitively understood.
Perhaps, it is a good reason to say goodbye to NetBurst architecture. Northwood had its moment of triumph and it shall not be forgotten. Unfortunately the moment was only one. And it was a long time ago...
Testbed memory modules were provided by Corsair Memory Russia
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