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Road to the Pentium 4: Introduction
By Kelly Lu - July 17, 2001
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A few weeks ago, a little box was delivered to my residence and inside it I found an Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz processor. Naturally, I began preparing to conduct a standard standalone review of it, since, that's what I'm usually accustomed to doing. But this is the first Pentium 4 processor that I've run across before and, due to the many changes that the Pentium 4 requires to my previous test system, which I will eventually outline here, I decided that the standalone wasn't the best way to go by this. After a little thought, I decided that I would conduct a series of reviews on products that are necessary for one to set up, or upgrade to, one of these new Pentium 4 processors and eventually end off with some benchmarks showcasing the performance capabilities of Intel's newest incarnation.
In this introductory article, we will outline some basic technical features of the Pentium 4, along with the basic hardware required to set up a Pentium 4 system. If you have not heard about which components are required in order to set up a Pentium 4 system, you might be surprised when reading this article about them, since some of them might seem a little unnecessary. At the center of this little digital world will be, of course, the Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz processor that I mentioned above.
I hope this article will provide you with enough information so that you, too, can, if you feel prompted, set up your own digital world powered by a Pentium 4 processor.
 The Pentium 4 was released near the end of 2000 amid much excitement-after all Intel had not release a brand new core since the P6 core was introduced back in 1995. At introductory clock speeds of 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz, it was, and still is, in terms of clock speed, the fastest consumer CPU on the market. A few months later, the 1.7GHz that we're looking at here was released and then, about a week ago, the 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz was released to push the performance even higher.
Now, some of you must be asking why I'm looking at a 1.7GHz when there's a 1.8GHz processor out there. My answer? With the 1.8GHz released, the prices for lower-clocked processors such as the 1.7GHz will be considerably lowered and will be more within the reach of buyers. Thus, the 1.7GHz should provide excellent performance at a considerably lower price than its bigger brother, the 1.8GHz-more bang for the buck.
Already, we begin to see the first advantage that the new P4 core brings. Within a few short months, we've seen the clock speed jump 400MHz from 1.4GHz to 1.8GHz, a feat that took almost 3 decades to overcome before the Pentium 4. As one can see, the Pentium 4 is capable of scaling clock speeds unlike any other consumer CPU on the market and that is its main advantage.
Unfortunately, the new core also has some significant disadvantages. Some of you might be saying to yourself, if the fastest Pentium III available is 1.0GHz and the fastest Pentium 4 is a 1.8GHz, then using the Pentium 4 would give a performance boost of 80%, right? Wrong. In order for Intel to be able to boost clock speed this dramatically, they had to implement some engineering "tricks."
 On to: Intel's NetBurst Architecture
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