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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.
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.
Willamette, the first Pentium 4, suffered long delays in the design process. Most industry experts regarded the initial 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5 GHz P4 release as a stopgap product, introduced before it was truly ready. According to these experts, the Willamette was released because the competing AMD Athlon Thunderbird was at that time outperforming the elderly Pentium III, and further improvements to the Intel P-III were not yet possible. The cores were produced using a 0.18 micrometre (180 nm) process and utilized socket 423 on motherboards.
On the test-bench, the Willamette was somewhat disappointing to analysts in that not only was it unable to outperform the Athlon and the highest-clocked P-IIIs in all testing situations, it was not clearly superior to even the low-end AMD Duron. Although introduced at a a price of 819 US Dollars(in 1000 unit wholesale quantities) it nevertheless sold at a modest but respectable rate.
In January 20012001 : January February March April May June July August September October November December This is a month starting on Monday with 31 days. January 2001 Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Dec 31 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15, a still slower 1.3 GHz model was added to the range, but over the next twelve months, Intel gradually started pegging back AMD's lead. April 20012001 : January February March April May June July August September October November December Events April 1: An EP-3E United States Navy plane collides with a Chinese People's Liberation Army fighter jet. The Navy crew makes an emergency landing in Hainan brought the 1.7 GHz P4, the first one to provide performance clearly superior to the old Pentium III. July saw 1.6 and 1.8 GHz models and in August 2001, Intel released 1.9 and 2.0 GHz Pentium 4s.
The 2.0 was the first P4 to provide a serious challenge to the rival Athlon Thunderbird, which until then had been unquestionably the fastest X86 CPU on the market. Many observers concluded that the Thunderbird was still faster overall, but the performance gap was sufficiently narrow that it was a not unreasonable for partisans of either camp to claim superiority. For Intel, this was a very significant achievement. The firm had held the CPU performance crown for nearly 16 years straight, with only two brief exceptions prior to the release of the AMD Athlon.
In October 2001 the Athlon XP regained a clear lead for AMD, but in January 20022002 : January February March April May June July August September October November December A timeline of events in the news for January, 2002. See also Afghanistan timeline January 1-16, 2002 Afghanistan timeline January 17-31, 2002 January 29, 2002 Geo Intel released Pentium 4s with their new Northwood core at 2.0 and 2.2 GHz. Northwood combined an increase in the secondary cache size from 256k to 512k with a transition to a new 0.13 micrometre (130 nm) process technology. By making the chip out of smaller transistors, it could run faster and yet consume less power. Unfortunately for many consumers, the new core also made upgrades impossible due to the requirement of a new socket (socket 478), though some of the later Willamettes were produced with this socket.
With Northwood, the P4 came of age. The battle for performance leadeship remained competitive (as AMD introduced faster versions of the Athlon XP) but most observers agreed that the fastest Northwood P4 was usually a fraction ahead of its rival. This was particularly so in the northern summer of 2002, when AMD's changeover to a 0.13 micrometre (130 nm) production process was delayed and the P4s in the 2.4 to 2.8 GHz range were clearly the fastest chips on the market.
A 2.4 GHz P4 was released in April 20022002 : January February March April May June July August September October November December A timeline of events in the news for April, 2002. See also Afghanistan timeline April 2002 April 28, 2002 Recent celebrity deaths: Alexander Lebed Russian General, a 2.53 GHz part in May (at which point the bus speed was increased from the original 400MHz to 533MHz), 2.6 and 2.8 GHz parts in August, and a 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 arrived in November.
The 3.06 GHz processor supported Hyper-threadingHyper-threading is Intel's trademark for their implementation of the simultaneous multithreading technology on the Pentium 4 microarchitecture. It is basically a more advanced form of Super-threading that first debuted on the Intel Xeon processors and lat (first appeared in Xeon), enabling multiple threads to be run together by duplicating some parts of the processor in order to let the operating system believe that there are two logical processors.
In April 2003, Intel launched new variants, ranging from 2.4 to 3.0 GHz. The key difference on these new versions was that they all supported Hyper-Threading, and ran their system buses at 800 MHz. This was supposedly to compete better with AMD's Hammer line of processors. However, only Opteron was launched, and AMD initially refused to provide an AGP controller, thus preventing the Opteron from encroaching on the Pentium 4's territory. AMD did boost the Athlon XP's bus speed from 333 MHz to 400 MHz, but it wasn't enough to hold off the new 3.0 GHz P4. A 3.2 GHz variant was launched in June and a final 3.4GHz version was launched in early 2004.
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