Introduction
This is now my third article about Pentium 4 within less than a week. Again, it will draw new conclusions because we found new interesting and important facts that need to be considered. I am fully aware of the risk that some of you might feel confused by now and some might lose their faith in me, but what I want to show with this continuous flow of Pentium 4 articles is that right now it is very difficult to ensure a valid, meaningful and fair evaluation of Intel's latest processor, simply because it is of a brand new design with very special and uncommon behavior in what we would consider a default set of benchmarks. Even at this point I would be dishonest to say that our P4-testing has been finalized. In fact, I have just finished another new set of tests with Pentium 4 that will be excellent material for another article after this one.
What I want to reach with those numerous P4-write-ups is to keep you as a reader as updated as possible. I want to involve you in this complicated process of evaluating a very complex product that is of highly political as well as technical importance. Instead of claiming that Tom's Hardware has got all the answers about Pentium 4 right now, I want you to realize that the 'search for the truth behind Pentium 4' is a meticulous task that takes a lot more than just running a few benchmarks, taking a few pictures, counting two and two together and then drawing some simple kind of conclusions. I also don't want to serve you a bottom line that goes "... well, I also really don't know what to say about Pentium 4, but I believe that it could maybe be a great product sometimes in the future. It might not be as well though ..." I know that my readers expect authoritative conclusions from me, you expect me to 'cut the crap' and to come up with a valid, reliable and crystal clear stand point. With Pentium 4,reaching this clear standpoint is more difficult than with any other product that I have evaluated before. Therefore I decided to not just serve you a whole menu, but to actually involve you in the cooking process, serving dish after dish. The final meal-evaluation can only be done once the dessert has been eaten. Right now we are only at the third course.
