Intel's Pentium 4 570J - Will 3.8GHz do the trick?

Final Words

With the 570J being the last desktop Pentium 4 launched in 2004 (once again, not counting the Extreme Edition), it looks like AMD will close out this year on top, which is fitting considering how strong AMD has been throughout the entire year.

Looking at the performance of the Pentium 4 570J it's clear that had Intel launched the 4GHz Pentium 4 things would have been much more competitive than we first thought. AMD would still hold the crown in gaming performance, but Intel would have been able to pick up a lot of lost steam in other areas and continue to solidify leads in content creation, 3D rendering and encoding applications.

We're still being cautiously pessimistic about the types of performance gains we'll see from the upcoming 600 series of CPUs from Intel. As you may have already read, Intel is planning on doubling the L2 cache of Prescott and launching a new 600 series of CPUs next year. With twice the L2 cache Intel will attempt to get most of the benefits of an on-die memory controller, mainly reduced memory access latencies, without actually implementing one. We've seen the positive impact this can have with Intel's Extreme Edition chips, but even then, it may not be enough. Raw clock speed is what the Pentium 4's architecture was designed for, and only that will give Intel a commanding lead - unfortunately for them 3.8GHz does seem to be the end of the road for quite a while.

The performance paradigm will eventually shift to being more depending on multithreading capabilities, but that transition is far from being complete, especially on the desktop. It may end up being that Longhorn in 2006 is when we start to reap the benefits of more than just clock speed with every processor release.

Right now we couldn't be happier with AMD, they are more on top of their game today than they ever were with the Athlon XP and the Athlon 64 platform is by far the most attractive platform AMD has ever had. We've seen AMD offer leading performance in the past, but never have they commanded such a strong lead for such an incredible length of time. If AMD could have repeat of 2004 next year the few companies that still don't take them seriously enough may finally come around.