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Generation Four

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DQI Bureau
New Update

The Pentium 4 is here. Intel’s glittering P4 launch in New

Delhi’s Park Royal was the first one in the world, thanks partly to Delhi

being a half-day ahead of the US time zones. The multimedia apps demos were

impressive: streaming media, audio and video editing at blazing speeds. But as

usual, the real world is far removed from the demo floor.

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The P4 does not do much to standard office apps like Word or

Excel. So it’s unlikely that businesses will be flocking to pick up the new

machines (expected to cost well over Rs 1 lakh in India) in a hurry. What it

does do is speed up multimedia: MP3 encoding, streaming media, et al. are 25 to

50% faster. Coupled with its pricetag, and the fact that it only supports the

more expensive Rambus memory as of now, P4 sales may not overtake PIII sales

until well into 2001.

The P4 is a new chip: with a new micro-architecture, unlike

the PIII which simply extended the PII. The new "NetBurst"

architecture uses a 400 MHz system bus, tripling data speed (compared to the

PIII’s 133 MHz system bus). "Advanced dynamic execution" processes

data more efficiently, such as by recognizing parallel patterns and priorities.

Other key features include:

  • A rapid execution

    engine which runs at twice the speed of the processor and handles frequent

    tasks such as addition and subtraction

  • Execution trace

    cache, a memory area to store and transfer data for high-speed processing

  • 144 new

    instructions to improve multimedia performance.

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The launch period wasn’t without glitches: early-shipment

chips contained incorrect code, though this was fixed before the chips reached

consumers, according to Intel, through updated BIOS code sent to PC makers.

(Earlier this year, Intel had to recall defective 1.13 GHz PIII chips and some

circuit boards.)

Testers haven’t been enthusiastic in their reports, saying

that the P4 is not working much faster than PIII or AMD Athlon chips, and in

some cases it’s slower than both. How can a P4 be slower than a PIII? One

reason could be the P4’s 20-stage pipeline, twice as long as the PIII’s and

bigger than the Athlon’s 15-stage pipeline. This means data has to travel

through more stages, and more time is lost if there are errors. So why a long

pipeline? Largely for the future: it allows faster clock speeds, and once

software recompiled for the P4 ships, it can work more efficiently. But today’s

standard software won’t be running much faster on the P4.

Gaming and media sites have reported faster performance with

media apps, with the Quake III genre of high-power games, and with

floating-point intensive scientific calculations. For most real apps, the P4’s

no better than the PIII. "It’s slower than the competition in just about

every area," says Anand Lal Shimpi, who runs the review site anandtech.com.

The P4 is shipping with 1.4 GHz (about $820 in quantities of 1,000) and 1.5

GHz clocks, expected to go to 2 GHz in a year. Intel continues with the Pentium

III and Celeron chips too–for the desktop, but more so for the mobile, which

will not get P4 chips for at least a year. DQ

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