Intel's New Pentium 4 Processor

Introduction

Finally, Intel is more determined than ever to take back what once was thought to be in its possession until eternity. The brand new Pentium 4 processor shall make Intel the provider of the fastest, most advanced and thus simply best microprocessor in the world. Intel wants to get back to the top and leave AMD far behind. The mysterious Pentium 4, codename 'Willamette', is supposed to be powerful enough to ensure that Intel reaches this juicy goal. Let's see if this new processor is indeed good enough.

The Architecture Of Pentium 4

Intel's declining image and the success of its opponent AMD forced the chip giant to act different than ever before. While it used to be very difficult to find out any details of upcoming Intel-processors ahead of their release in the past 10 years, Intel was giving major amounts of architectural information about Pentium 4 to whomever was asking for it. Thus I am sure that most of you have already heard loads about Pentium 4's funky 'NetBurst-Architecture', the 'Rapid Execution Engine', the 'Hyper Pipeline, 'SSE2' and even the glorious 'Execution Trace Cache'. However, following a long tradition, I will still dedicate a major amount of time of this article to a detailed explanation of what is really behind Pentium 4 and all its fancy new features. It's the best way to understand the following benchmark results and it should help you making a decision if Pentium 4 is indeed a product for you.

  • utahraptor
    I just don't see this Rambus lasting that long. I think the future lies in DDR.
    Reply
  • ta152h
    utahraptorI just don't see this Rambus lasting that long. I think the future lies in DDR.
    I think the Pentium 4 will not last past 2006.
    Reply