Intel's Pentium 4 Processor ~ Holy Smoke!
Oct 29 '00 (Updated Nov 01 '00)
As an avid AMD loyalist for some time now, I have been basking in the glory of the AMD Athlon processor with it's Alpha EV6 inspired 200MHz system bus. The Athlon processor actually made Intel sit up and take notice that they were no longer alone in the trek to faster processing power.
This evening we were called to a meeting at work for product training. In the retail field, this usually means you sit and try not to fall asleep while a guy with white hair who makes about six times your salary talks about his company's product for a couple of hours. Not tonight. We were treated to a short introduction to the new Intel Pentium 4 processor and I have to admit, I was thoroughly impressed.
The Intel Pentium 4 processor will be introduced in the very near future at an amazing speed of 1.4GHz and will run on a 400MHz system bus. The new processor will introduce SSE2 and new SIMD instructions. All total, 144 new instructions will be added to the current instructions built into the Pentium III processors.
This alone was enough to get my attention but there is more to it than that. The new processor will also have a new Intel chipset designed for the motherboards that support it. The Intel i850 chipset. We were not indulged with very much information on this chipset other than it will support AGP 8x. Another feature of the supporting motherboards will be a dual RDRAM bus giving 400MHz times two for main memory bandwidth. Unfortunately the RAMBUS memory is still very expensive and the Pentium 4 processor will not be compatible with PC100 or PC133 SDRAM. The motherboard we were shown will support up to six 1GB RDRAM modules giving a possible total capacity of 6GB of RDRAM!
Unlike Intel's new upcoming 64-bit processor, the Pentium 4 will be a 32-bit processor and therefor still compatible with current operating systems like Windows 95, 98, ME, NT and 2000 as well as Linux, Unix, BeOS and many others. As usual, the new processor will be available only in new name brand computers (we were not told which ones) at first then slowly become available to the average Joe. We were not given an actual release date, but they did say that it would be very soon.
Intel has pulled all the stops for this processor and I await more information in the near future. AMD will have their work cut out for them to keep up with this new technology from Intel. I will update this review as I learn more information about this wonderful new chip.
Update: 11/01/2000 ~ New Information
I would like to recognize Epinions member and Computers Advisor Vic Wang for sending me the information I am about to share with you.
The first Pentium 4 motherboars will support only RAMBUS or otherwise known as RDRAM memory, but Intel has plans to have a chipset on motherboards supporting SDRAM and possibly even DDR memory sometime next year after the initial introduction of the P4. VIA also has plans on releasing a chipset for the Pentium 4 supporting DDR memory.
There is some speculation as to the overall performance speed of the Pentium 4 compared to the Pentium III. The Pentium 4 has 144 new instructions built into the processor but these new instruction must go through 20 separate stages as opposed to 12 stages for the Pentium III processor. This extremely long pipeline actually lowers the performance in a clock-for-clock benchmark comparison between the two processors.
The Athlon processor on the other hand has only 10 stages for it's instruction to go through, even though it has a lot less instructions than the Pentium 4 will have it still may out perform the Pentium 4 in most benchmarks at the same clock speed. This is very interesting and I will investigate further into this new information. A good place to get more information for yourself is at the following web address.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2619619,00.html?chkpt=zdnnmoreon
Again, thanks to Vic Wang for bringing this information to light for me and for the web link above. If you would like to visit Vic Wang's profile page, he has a lot of information on computers and processors. The address of his profile page is...
http://www.epinions.com/user-vicwang
Thanks for reading.
:-)Gr8ful
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