Pentium 4 Essay -- Intel CPU Central Processing Units

Recently Intel introduced their newest line of the Pentium 4 central processing units with the new Prescott core. In this paper I willing discuss how the Pentium 4 processor works and the changes that have been made since its release, but mainly on the modifications in the newest Pentium 4s with the Prescott core. I will also briefly comp atomic number 18 the performance levels of some of the divers(prenominal) types of Pentium 4s.The Pentium 4 line of processors encompasses a large range of clock speeds, from 1.7GHz up to 3.6GHz in the Prescott chip. Pentium 4s are all built with the same Netburst microarchitecture, but there are varieties of front side bus speeds, chip layout, and cores available. For example at 2.8GHz, one could choose from four different Pentium 4s the 2.8GHz (a Northwood core with a 533MHz front-side bus), the 2.8C (Northwood again, but with an 800MHz bus), the 2.8A (Prescott with a 533MHz bus), or the 2.8E (Prescott with 800MHz bus). In all there are fou r types Pentium 4 versions that Intel has released each having slight improvements then the last.The first Pentium 4 (Willamette) was introduced in November 2000 to re smear its predecessor the Pentium 3. The Pentium 4 was the first to have a totally new chip architecture since the 1995 Pentium Pro. The biggest difference being Intels introduction of the Netburst microarchitecture, which involved structural changes that affected how processing takes place within the chip. Aspects of the changes include a 20-stage pipeline, which boosts performance by increasing processor frequency a rapid-execution engine, which doubles the core frequency and reduces latency by change each instruction to be executed in a half (rather than a whole) clock cycle a 400 MHz system bus, which ena... ...helped immensely in offsetting Prescotts enlarged 31-stage pipeline, but did not entirely make up the gap. On balance, Prescotts are slightly slower than Northwoods. In time it is expected that the Pre scott P4s will look relatively stronger as SSE3 instructions are adopted in more software application and, especially, as clock speeds rise. But it seems that the real effectiveness of Prescott seems to lie in its Hyper-Threading performance. In the most of the multitasking tests, the Prescott performed better than the Northwood CPU. The Pentium 4 Extreme reading was the best performer, but unfortunately it is also very expensive. The P4 Extreme Edition had the best results for content creation and video editing applications. Also as Intel suggested the P4 Extreme Edition performed very well for games, but I do not believe it is significant enough to warrant the extra cost.