Pentium 4

The Pentium 4 is a seventh-generation x86 architecture microprocessor produced by Intel and is their first all-new CPU design, called the NetBurst architecture, since the Pentium Pro of 1995. The original Pentium 4, codenamed "Willamette", ran at 1.4 and 1.5 GHz and was released in November 2000 on the Socket 423 platform. Unlike the Pentium II, Pentium III, and various Celerons, the architecture owed little to the Pentium Pro design, and was new from the ground up. Notable with the introduction of the Pentium 4 was the very fast 400 MHz FSB; it was actually a 100 MHz Quad-pumped bus, but the theoretical bandwidth was 4x that of a normal bus, and so it was considered to run at 400 MHz- the fastest competition was running at 266 MHz (133 MHz Double-pumped).

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To the surprise of most industry observers, the Pentium 4 did not improve on the old P6 design in either of the normal two key performance measures: integer processing speed or floating-point performance. Instead, it sacrificed per-cycle performance in order to gain two things: very high clockspeeds, and SSE performance. As is traditional with Intel's flagship chips, the Pentium 4 also comes in a low-end Celeron version (often referred to as Celeron 4) and a high-end Xeon version intended for SMP configurations.

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The Pentium 4 performs much less work per cycle than other CPUs (such as the various Athlon or older Pentium III architectures) but the original design objective - to sacrifice instructions per clock cycle in order to achieve a greater number of cycles per second (i.e. greater frequency or clockspeed) - has been fulfilled until the platform ran into unsolvable thermal problems before reaching 4 GHz, far short of the original scalability claim of 10 GHz. As of mid-2005, Intel has abandoned further work on Pentium 4 to focus on cooler running Pentium M derived solutions for the desktop PC and small server market. This essentially means Intel has returned to the Pentium III CPU core and only the system bus of the Pentium 4 will live on.

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