Saving time when encoding to MP3 music files, higher frame rates for 3D games, and more quickly creating, editing, and sharing professional-quality video are just a few areas where the Pentium 4 processor can deliver end-user appreciable benefits.

With innovative features such as Hyper Pipelined Technology, 400 MHz System Bus, Execution Trace Cache, and Rapid Execution Engine the Pentium 4 processor delivers awesome performance for today's Visual Internet but is also designed for where the Internet is going.

The Intel® Pentium® 4 processor, Intel’s most advanced, most powerful processor, is based on the new Intel® NetBurst™ micro-architecture. The Pentium 4 processor is designed to deliver performance across applications and usages where end users can truly appreciate and experience the performance. These applications include Internet audio and streaming video, image processing, video content creation, speech, 3D, CAD, games, multi-media, and multi-tasking user environments. The Intel Pentium 4 processor delivers this world-class performance for consumer enthusiast and business professional desktop users as well as for entry-level workstation users.

Highlights of the Pentium 4 processor:

• Available at speeds ranging from 1.30 to 1.80 GHz
• Featuring the new Intel NetBurst micro-architecture
• Supported by the Intel® 850 chipset
• Fully compatible with existing Intel Architecture-based software
• Internet Streaming SIMD Extensions 2
• Intel® MMX™ media enhancement technology
• Memory cacheability up to 4 GB of addressable memory space and system memory scalability up to 64 GB of physical memory
• Support for uni-processor designs
• Based upon Intel’s 0.18 micron manufacturing process

THE INTEL® PENTIUM® 4 PROCESSOR AND INTEL® 850

The Pentium 4 processor at 1.30 GHz, 1.40 GHz, 1.50 GHz, 1.60 GHz, 1.70 GHz, and 1.80 GHz enables high performance through the innovative NetBurst micro-architecture—including Hyper Pipelined Technology, 400 MHz System Bus, Execution Trace Cache, and Rapid Execution Engine—in addition to a number of enhanced features—including the Advanced Transfer Cache, Advanced Dynamic Execution, Enhanced Floating-point and Multimedia units, and Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2)—which provide a powerful combination to meet the higher performance and data bandwidth needs for today’s and tomorrow’s computing environment.

The Intel Pentium 4 processor provides awesome performance for the Visual Internet and is fully compatible with existing Intel Architecture-based software. The Pentium 4 processor takes desktop performance into the future by offering performance headroom designed to maximize the life of your PC investment. Software designed for the Pentium 4 processor unleashes its full multimedia capabilities, including full-screen and full-motion video, realistic graphics, and an enhanced, exciting Internet experience.

Figure 1. The Spectrum of Performance

When a Pentium 4 processor is used in conjunction with an Intel ® 850 chipset, the resulting platform provides the highest level of performance for today’s software and performance headroom for tomorrow’s emerging software. With smoother audio and video, faster and more realistic 3D, and unmatched responsiveness for Internet applications, the Pentium 4 processor combined with the Intel 850 chipset provides best-in-class performance for today’s and tomorrow’s performance desktops.

The Intel 850 chipset implements the next step in the evolution of the Intel Hub Architecture and was designed in tandem with the Intel Pentium 4 processor and innovative Intel NetBurst micro-architecture. The Intel 850 chipset was designed to maximize performance and enhance the PC user experience both on and off the Internet. Features such as a 400 MHz system bus offer a peak bandwidth of 3.2 GB/s, Dual RDRAM memory channels also offer a peak bandwidth of 3.2 GB/s that is balanced with the system bus, and the AGP 4X interface allows graphics controllers to access main memory at over 1 GB/s. Intel Hub Architecture delivers twice the I/O bandwidth as previous generation northbridge/southbridge technology. With dedicated data paths to fully optimize the additional bandwidth, the Intel 850 chipset offers significant gains in the Performance PC market and support for future Intel NetBurst micro-architecture-based processors.

Modern desktop systems are used to run a broad range of software applications. Multimedia, 3D, and Internet application use has increased sharply over the past few years, and this trend is anticipated to continue in the future. For this reason, a wide range of benchmarks should be used to evaluate processor and system performance. PC users and buyers should consider the entire Spectrum of Performance, which includes productivity, multimedia, 3D, and Internet performance. The Pentium 4 processor offers great performance for today’s and tomorrow’s applications developed for the Intel architecture, as well as the quality, reliability, and compatibility you have come to expect from the world’s leading microprocessor company.

This performance brief introduces the Pentium 4 processor, explains the technologies that make it work, examines the purpose and methods behind the industry’s most useful benchmarks, and shows how the Pentium 4 processor currently performs on each of the respective benchmarks. As new benchmarks are introduced, this performance brief will be updated as appropriate.

Product Highlights

The Intel NetBurst micro-architecture delivers a number of new and innovative features including Hyper Pipelined Technology, 400 MHz System Bus, Execution Trace Cache, and Rapid Execution Engine as well as a number of enhanced features Advanced Transfer Cache, Advanced Dynamic Execution, Enhanced Floating-point and Multi-media Unit, and Streaming SIMD Extensions 2. Many of these new innovations and advances were made possible with improvements in processor technology, process technology, and circuit design that could not previously be implemented in high-volume, manufacturable solutions. The features and resulting benefits of the new micro-architecture are defined below.

• Hyper Pipelined Technology:
  The hyper-pipelined technology of the NetBurst micro-architecture doubles the pipeline depth compared to the P6 micro-architecture used on today’s Pentium III processors. One of the key pipelines, the branch prediction / recovery pipeline, is implemented in 20 stages in the NetBurst micro-architecture, compared to 10 stages in the P6 micro-architecture. This technology significantly increases the performance, frequency, and scalability of the processor.
  
  
• 400 MHz System Bus:
  The Pentium 4 processor supports Intel’s highest performance desktop system bus by delivering 3.2 GB of data per second into and out of the processor. This is accomplished through a physical signaling scheme of quad pumping the data transfers over a 100-MHz clocked system bus and a buffering scheme allowing for sustained 400-MHz data transfers. This compares to 1.06 GB/s delivered on the Pentium III processor’s 133-MHz system bus.
  
  
• Level 1 Execution Trace Cache:
  In addition to the 8KB data cache, the Pentium 4 processor includes an Execution Trace Cache that stores up to 12K decoded micro-ops in the order of program execution. This increases performance by removing the decoder from the main execution loop and makes more efficient usage of the cache storage space since instructions that are branched around are not stored. The result is a means to deliver a high volume of instructions to the processor’s execution units and a reduction in the overall time required to recover from branches that have been mis-predicted.
  
  
• Rapid Execution Engine:
  Two Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs) on the Pentium 4 processor are clocked at twice the core processor frequency. This allows basic integer instructions such as Add, Subtract, Logical AND, Logical OR, etc. to execute in half a clock cycle. For example, the Rapid Execution Engine on a 1.50 GHz Pentium 4 processor runs at 3 GHz.
  
  
• 256KB, Level 2 Advanced Transfer Cache:
  The Level 2 Advanced Transfer Cache (ATC) is 256KB in size and delivers a much higher data throughput channel between the Level 2 cache and the processor core. The Advanced Transfer Cache consists of a 256-bit (32-byte) interface that transfers data on each core clock. As a result, the Pentium 4 processor 1.50 GHz can deliver a data transfer rate of 48 GB/s. This compares to a transfer rate of 16 GB/s on the Pentium III processor at 1 GHz. Features of the ATC include:
  • Non-Blocking, full speed, on-die Level 2 cache
  • 8-way set associativity
  • 256-bit data bus to the level 2 cache
  • Data clocked into and out of the cache every clock cycle
  
  
• Advanced Dynamic Execution:
  The Advanced Dynamic Execution engine is a very deep, out-of-order speculative execution engine that keeps the execution units executing instructions. The Pentium 4 processor can also view 126 instructions in flight and handle up to 48 loads and 24 stores in the pipeline. It also includes an enhanced branch prediction algorithm that has the net effect of reducing the number of branch mis-predictions by about 33% over the P6 generation processor’s branch prediction capability. It does this by implementing a 4KB branch target buffer that stores more detail on the history of past branches, as well as by implementing a more advanced branch prediction algorithm.
  
  
• Enhanced Floating-Point and Multimedia Unit:
  The Pentium 4 processor expands the floating-point registers to a full 128-bit and adds an additional register for data movement which improves performance on both floating-point and multimedia applications.
  
  
• Internet Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2):
  With the introduction of SSE2, the NetBurst micro-architecture now extends the SIMD capabilities that MMX technology and SSE technology delivered by adding 144 new instructions. These instructions include 128-bit SIMD integer arithmetic and 128-bit SIMD double-precision floating-point operations. These new instructions reduce the overall number of instructions required to execute a particular program task and as a result can contribute to an overall performance increase. They accelerate a broad range of applications, including video, speech, and image, photo processing, encryption, financial, engineering and scientific applications.
  
  
• Features Used for Test and Performance / Thermal Monitoring:
  • Built-in Self Test (BIST) provides single stuck-at fault coverage of the microcode and large logic arrays, as well as testing of the instruction cache, data cache, Translation Lookaside Buffers (TLBs), and ROMs.
  • IEEE 1149.1 Standard Test Access Port and Boundary Scan mechanism enables testing of the Pentium 4 processor and system connections through a standard interface.
  • Internal performance counters can be used for performance monitoring and event counting.
  • Includes a new Thermal Monitor feature that allows motherboards to be cost effectively designed to expected application power usages rather than theoretical maximums