The next generation of
microprocessors from
Intel. Features such as a 32-bit microprocessor, hyper-pipelined technology, a rapid execution engine and a 100MHz system bus that delivers three times the
bandwidth of the Pentium III processor are designed to enhance online gaming, digital video and photography, speech recognition and
MP3 encoding. Current speeds run at 1.4 and 1.5 GHz.
The Pentium 4 processor also features:
- New Level 1 cache technology - Execution Trace Cache, which delivers a higher performance instruction cache than the Pentium III through a more efficient use of cache memory.
- NetBurst microarchitecture doubles the pipelength depth to 20 stages, and increases the frequency capability.
- Streaming SIMD extension 2 (SSE2) -- 144 new instructions, a 128-bit SIMD integer arithmetic and 128-bit SIMD double precision floating point instructions.
