[Felagund]

I am in an intro to computing class and have a small assignment to do that requires me to research the the Pentium 4 processor. I am supposed to find out things like:
The sort of instruction set it uses
The collection of available registers
The existence of cache memory
Its computing speed in MIPS and MFLOPS
How much primary memory it has and how memory is addressed in the instructions
Memory access time
In what size "chunks" memory can be accessed

I have only been partially successful in looking these things up on the internet.

So far it looks like the Pentium 4 uses SSE2 or SSE3 instructions, but I am not even sure these are technically "instruction sets," and, if so, I have very little idea how many instructions they contain. I think I found a place that said SSE2 had 130 instructions, but I really could not be sure. What I am pretty sure of is that pretty much all processors use complex instruction sets that are then decoded into reduced instruction sets.

I believe that the CPU has 128 floating point registers and 128 integer registers.

It looks like there are different levels of cache memory, with L1 a different size than L2. I wonder if someone could expand on this for me.

I have had almost zero luck in determing MFLOPS and MIPS. It looks like there are many different answers to this question depending on the processors specifications. I wonder if someone could give me an answer based on the most common specifications today, and perhaps explain a bit about what the specifications mean. For instance, I see 2 Ghz vs. 1.5 Ghz. Is that just straight internal clock speed? Why is there so much variance all within the Pentium 4?

As far as how much primary memory there is and how much is addressed in the instructions, I believe I an at least answer the first part of that, though I haven't looked really hard yet.

On memory access time, this seems to be variable as well. What I have seen is 100 Mhz external clock with QDR, for 400 Mhz effective transfer rate and 3.2 GB/s. Does this sound right? Or are more updated versions faster than this?

I have no idea on the answer to the last question.

Any help any of you can provide would be much appreciated.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page you should find everything there just search for it.

Edited by warriorscot, 04 March 2006 - 10:06 AM.

[warriorscot]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page you should find everything there just search for it.

Edited by warriorscot, 04 March 2006 - 10:06 AM.

[Felagund]

Thanks for nothing. I guess it was reasonable to assume that I had not visited wikipedia but that is not the case. I am sure it is true that everything I need is there. That's not very different from an auto mechanic handing me the manufaturer specs on my Acura and telling me "Just look through there and you should be able to fix the problem."

Try to find a place on wikipedia where it quotes the actual number of instructions in the set used by Pentium 4, or the number of MFLOPS and MIPS that it can achieve. I have gone 5 references deep and failed to find those numbers. Every question just leads to another question. This is meant to be a short, 1/2 page to page report in a very basic computer course. I am not meant to learn how to build a computer from scratch.

[fleamailman]

High, does this help?

http://www.geek.com/...ec/procspec.htm

btw If you bite the hand that feeds you, it won't.

[warriorscot]

The info is easily found either on wiki or elsewhere, but fleamailman was quite correct and i very much dislike people being rude.

[Felagund]

Thanks for your post fleamailman. That info confirms some of what I've found, as well as concisely listing many of the different version of the Pentium 4 out there. I am still at a loss on the MFLOPS and MIPS, though. That info just doesn't seem to be anywhere. Any thoughts?

Scot, I dislike rudeness as well. I also dislike dismissive and/or condescending responses. My original post made it clear I had already done some looking. Forwarding me on to a vast encyclopedia is not what I would call helpful. Personally, I am a mathematician. If someone asked me for help in understanding certain specific aspects of stochastic calculus, I could equally send them on to Wikipedia and say "Look it up." But the truth is they would never be able to sort through everything there unless they were already fairly expert in stochastic calculus.

If you really believe the info I am asking for is "easily found" then you don't understand what "easily" means, or else you just haven't ever tried looking. If it is so easy, refer me to the place with the answer to the MFLOPS and MIPS question. It doesn't have to say "Pentium 4 - Mflops - x." But at least show me how to find a way of converting from some other value I can find.

So in what way have I "bit the hand that fed me?" Is a link to Wikipedia what passes for food? Think again.

[warriorscot]

The fact that i found the info searching for p4 didnt really justify much detail, read some reviews on p4s.

[yesiammanu]

CPU
P4 1.5GHz: CPU: 2866 MIPS, FPU: 882 MFLOPS
P4 1.6GHz: CPU: 3004 MIPS, FPU: 947 MFLOPS

Memory
P4 1.5GHz: ALU/Mem: 1311 MB/s, FPU/Mem: 1340 MB/s
P4 1.6GHz: ALU/Mem: 1339 MB/s, FPU/Mem: 1364 MB/s

http://www.theregist...4_overclocking/

I hope that helps on the mflop thing

[Felagund]

Thanks, that is helpful. Could someone explain to me about ALU/mem and FPU/mem? The way I understood it, the P4 had a 100 Mhz external clock and QDR, and with a 64 bit bus that gave it 3.2 GB/s. How does this relate to ALU/mem and FPU/mem? I cannot find good definitions of those terms.