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Pentium 4

Pentium 4
Produced From 2000 to 2008
Max. CPU clock rate 1.3 GHz to 3.8 GHz
FSB speeds 400 MT/s to 1066 MT/s
Instruction set x86 (i386), x86-64, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3
Microarchitecture NetBurst
Transistors 42M 180 nm
55M 130 nm
169M 130 nm (P4EE)
125M 90 nm
188M 65 nm
Socket(s)
Predecessor Pentium III
Successor Pentium D

Pentium 4 was a line of single-core central processing units (CPUs) for desktops, laptops and entry-level servers introduced by Intel on November 20, 2000 and shipped through August 8, 2008. They had a seventh-generation x86 (32-bit) microarchitecture, called NetBurst, which was the company's first all-new design since the introduction of the P6 microarchitecture of the Pentium Pro CPUs in 1995. NetBurst differed from P6 (Pentium III, II, etc.) by featuring a very deep instruction pipeline to achieve very high clock speeds. Intel claimed that NetBurst would allow clock speeds of up to 10 GHz in future chips; however, severe problems with heat dissipation (especially with the Prescott Pentium 4) limited CPU clock speeds to a much lower 3.8 GHz.

In 2004, the initial 32-bit x86 instruction set of the Pentium 4 microprocessors was extended by the 64-bit x86-64 set.

The first Pentium 4 cores, codenamed Willamette, were clocked from 1.3 GHz to 2 GHz. They were released on November 20, 2000, using the Socket 423 system. Notable with the introduction of the Pentium 4 was the 400 MT/s FSB. It actually operated at 100 MHz, but the FSB was quad-pumped, meaning that the maximal transfer rate was four times the base clock of the bus, so it was marketed to run at 400 MHz. The AMD Athlon's double-pumped FSB was running at 100 or 133 MHz (200 or 266 MT/s) at that time.

Pentium 4 CPUs introduced the SSE2 and, in the Prescott-based Pentium 4s, SSE3 instruction sets to accelerate calculations, transactions, media processing, 3D graphics, and games. Later versions featured Hyper-Threading Technology (HTT), a feature to make one physical CPU work as two logical CPUs. Intel also marketed a version of their low-end Celeron processors based on the NetBurst microarchitecture (often referred to as Celeron 4), and a high-end derivative, Xeon, intended for multiprocessor servers and workstations. In 2005, the Pentium 4 was complemented by the Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition dual-core CPUs.


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