A Sneak Peak at Intel's 65 nm Pentium 4

Cedar Mill Cools Down The Pentium 4 Heat

Later on, the platform was renewed twice , but performance levels did not really increase much any more. At the same time, criticism about the Pentium 4 Prescott core was reaching new heights, as the chip and its derivatives with 2 MB L2 cache as well as the dual core Smithfield were disappointments.

Today, AMD has the lead in both the single and the dual core desktop segments thanks to processors that not only perform better in most typical benchmarks, but they also require a whole lot less of power to do the job. This is obviously why Intel now focuses on platform solutions rather than on components. However, we have to emphasize that this is the clear trend for the whole hardware industry, since hardware performance is something that is sufficiently available to everybody today. Even a low-cost processor will be fast enough to power the vast majority of today's applications. Convincing people to buy something new requires the vendor to show what can be done with the new device.

In any case, it is never wrong to make product improvements when possible. In the case of the Pentium 4 processor, which is going to remain the top seller for some time, these are mostly thermal issues and the addition of features that will enable future (virtualization technology or VT is one of them). So what improvements will Cedar Mill offer?

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.