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Built Today, Designed for the Future
 Well, that just about wraps up my introductory article on the Road to the Pentium 4. As I went through the basics of the Pentium 4's NetBurst architecture and as I described the necessary components needed for the Pentium 4, one very striking similarity arises: everything is designed for the future. For example, the idea behind the Hyper Pipelined Technology is that, in the future, the higher clock speed will make up for the performance lost by the longer pipeline. Another example is the fact that there are two very much-needed chipsets supporting more mainstream SD and DDR RAM slated for release later this year, further enhancing not only the performance of the Pentium 4 platform, but also, in my opinion, make the Pentium 4 more accepted in the industry as they give the buyer more choices.
In other words, the Pentium 4 is only a new processor and, like all things technological, needs to be refined and matured; SSE2 needs to be implemented by developers; clock speeds needs to be ramped up; the platform needs to be refined.
It is, however, too early in these series of reviews for me to state whether the Pentium 4, as it stands now, is a viable solution for you since there's a lot to of things that I have yet to cover. Coming up in future parts, I will be looking at components needed to build a computer based on the Pentium 4 processor-more specifically, a case, a motherboard and a heatsink, in no particular order-and close by providing you with much-needed benchmark results to give you an idea of how the Pentium 4 performs now and, possibly, how it will perform in the future. I hope that, by looking at the technology behind the processor, the components needed to run the processor and the performance of the processor and components as a whole, I will be able to give you a better look at whether the Pentium 4 is a good choice for you now, or a few months, or even years, down the road.
Be sure to check back here at OnePC.NET in a week or so for part 2...
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