Friday, April 27, 2001

Introduction

In the continuous dash through the mad adventure we've all come to know as the "Gigahertz Wars", many a milestone has come to pass (and been passed) through the rivalry of the market's chief competitors - Intel and AMD. Now the race seems to have tipped in Intel's favor once again, as they announce the release of their spanking new 1.7GHz CPU.

The Pentium 4 constitutes an entirely new family of x86 processors, one which of course includes both the 1.4GHz and the 1.7GHz processors that we will be looking at presently.

During the course of our analysis, not only we won't be content with simply comparing performance figures relative to the 1GHz & 1.2GHz CPUs from AMD, but we'll also be taking a look at the new Intel D850GB reference board, which uses the i850 chipset from Intel of course.

So, without further ado, let's get to the heart of the matter, and take a closer look at our newest contestants.

The Intel Pentium 4 processor. A number of characteristics distinguish the Pentium 4 family of processors from the Pentium III. For one, the 1.4GHz and 1.7GHz P4's - which have been manufactured using 0.18 micron processes - are each composed of no less than 42 million transistors. This seventh generation family of Intel CPUs is also the first to implement their new "Netburst" micro-architecture, which consists of a  number of  innovative  technologies,  including a

20-stage "Hyper Pipeline", a 400MHz system bus, a Trace Cache, and a Rapid Execution Engine, combined with a number of new refinements such as the Advanced Transfer Cache, Advanced Dynamic Execution, Enhanced Floating-Point and Multimedia Unit, and new Streaming SIMD 2 (SSE2) extension. Let's say we take a look at each of these in turn...

Suite: The 400Mhz and the NetBurst.