Pentium 4 is Intel’s main processor. It followed the Pentium 3, obviously, but included many new technologies. Unfortunately, even with these technologies, the Pentium 3 could still outrun the new Pentium 4. But, as the Pentium 4 got faster, the performance gap between the Pentium 3 and the Pentium 4 widened. Now the Pentium 3 is a distant memory, with the Pentium 4 well out in front.
The newer processors have something called Hyperthreading. This started with the 3.06GHz Pentium 4, and is featured in all 800MHz FSB Pentium 4′s. Hyperthreading is a way of making the system think there is two processors, which allows better multitasking and higher performance in multithreaded applications. Of course there isn’t really two processors, it’s just a “virtual” processor, achieved by duplicating certain parts of the processor inside. It doesn’t bring the same performance as a true dual processor setup though.
There is a variation on this processor called the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, which has 2MB of L3 cache to accompany the 512k already there. Also, the newer versions for the LGA775 socket have a 1066MHz FSB, while the plain old Pentium 4′s only go up to 800MHz FSB. As you can guess by the name, this is aimed at people who really will pay anything for top notch performance. But, I will say this: unless you really need Intel, this is a bad processor choice. AMD have the FX series of processors, lets do a price comparison:
AMD Athlon 64 FX-55
Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition
At time of writing, the FX-55 was $979, while the Extreme Edition was $1045. It’s not the price difference that is in question here, it is the performance for the money. To put it simply, unless you are video encoding which the Pentium 4 excels at, the FX-55 nearly always wins. It has received numerous best processor awards, and is even cheaper than the Extreme Edition. Even if you do video encoding, you would be better off with a normal Pentium 4 at the same clockspeed, you would get near the same performance. Sorry if that sounds AMD biased, but it is simply the truth. Extreme Edition is a bad choice when FX processors are available.
Even though the name has stayed the same, there have been many changes to the Pentium 4 processor. I will go into detail on the core rundown though.
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