Intel Pentium 4 - The new Technology

             Is the world ready for a newer, faster Pentium processor?  Intel has been working away on the CPU long known as Willamette, the 32-bit successor to the Pentium III. Having designed the new chip with a slant towards the multimedia and Internet applications, Intel positions the Pentium 4 architecture as a revolutionary advancement in the world of wired, multimedia PCs.

The Pentium 4 is more than a geared -up version of its predecessor. Its architecture, along with that of Intel 850 chipset that was designed alongside it, is dubbed Net Burst-a term most likely coined to conjure up images of high speed Web surfing.

The 0.18-micron P4 is built around a deep data pipeline called Hyper Pipeline Technology, which is what allows it to hit the market at a speedy 1.5 GHz, which is faster than the speediest Athlon on the market, which tops out at 1.2GHz. Its architecture takes branch prediction and out-of-order execution to the extreme: it pre fetches instructions that it thinks programs will want to execute them, which is more efficient than waiting for a program to make requests. While all current CPUs do this, the P4 brings to the party a special cache called a trace cache, where the processor stores decoded micro-operations and arranges them for even speedier access.

In addition, P4 systems won't be cheap and initially will work only with Rambus memory - an expensive technology that inspires arguments almost as heated as the Intel -AMD debates. A review of current consumer computers from Hewlett Packard, Gateway and Compaq shows that Athlon computers are often less expensive or come with bigger hard drives or faster chips than equivalent P3 systems let alone with P4.

Features of Pentium 4

1. 400 MHz system bus.
2. Hyper Pipelined Technology.
3. Rapid execution engine.
4. Execution trace cache.
5. Advanced transfer cache.
6. Advanced dynamic execution.
7. Enhanced floating point/multimedia.
8. Streaming SIMD extensions 2.

         P4 boxes will also be big because of the insulation required. The chip consumes an average of 50 watts of power when in operation. This is less than the 60-watt some of the Athlon chips consumed but more than standard P3s consume. Initially, the P4 will appear only in desktops. The present P4 does not support dual processor and multiprocessor servers. FOSTER- an enhanced version of the chip for dual processor servers will come out in the 2nd quarter of 2001 and chips for multiprocessor servers will come out in the 3rd quarter.