If you have been stuck in a case for the past month, the Pentium 4 processor from Intel has finally come out of its hole in the ground. Whether is saw its own shadow or not is yet to be determined. If you are a follower of the Church of Intel, you will say that the Pentium 4 is great because it has a Quad Pumped 100MHz bus, as well as a super long pipeline yielding super high clock speeds. If you’re a member of the Reform Church of AMD, you’ll say that the Pentium 4 is horrible because it’s x87 FPU is horrible and its chipsets support only Rambus DRAM, which can kick out the data in large amounts, but doesn’t do it as fast as most people would like.

Depending on how you look at it, the Pentium 4 can be either an advance as great as the 386 and Pentium Pro, or the worst move by Intel since it’s partnership with Rambus only a year ago. The fact is that the Pentium 4’s native x87 FPU that has been used since the days of co-processors is horrible. In fact, the x86 portion is most of the CPU, while the x87 portion is just the coprocessor, often called FPU, or Floating Point Unit. On all modern CPUs from the 386DX onwards, the x87 coprocessor was built into the processor itself. The inability for the P4 x87 unit to “get-it-up” will yield horrible 3D gaming scores in 99% of games out today. A Pentium !!! processor at 1GHz will beat the pants off of a Pentium 4 1.5GHz chip in almost any 3D game, but Quake 3. Many wonder why this is.

You don’t have to wonder anymore. Intel, as usual, is looking forward, as opposed to being caught in the present. Although the P4 x87 FPU is as bad as Aunt Helen’s Fruit Cake, it’s SSE2 FPU unit blows away any other SSE2 FPU unit (NOTE: only other SSE2 FPU Unit to date is of the Pentium !!! and Celeron II processors). Currently, Quake 3 is one of the only major games that is able to use SSE2 fully, and therefore shows that Pentium 4 processor kicking out many more Frames per Second than any other chip.

So the Pentium 4 has a wonderful SSE2 unit…so figgin what..eh? Well, it’s more than that. Currently, Intel’s biggest competitor plans to utilize an SSE2 unit in it’s next line of processors. Being Intel and AMD take up about 100% of the Desktop and Laptop market, where 100% of games are played, this means that sooner or later, SSE2 will be in almost all systems sold, unless you by an evil Cyrix/VIA Processor, which isn’t worth the gold in it’s pins. Finally, my last point; if SSE2 is in all of systems sold, 3D game programmers will start to use it in it’s games, meaning the Pentium 4 won’t look so bad after all, and could even end up being a Value Solution three or four years down the road.

Looking through our magical future glasses that I picked up as the local Wal-Mart for only US$3, the Pentium 4 is actually the first step in the long process of moving away from the old x87 Floating Point Unit and moving towards a newer and more advanced floating point unit. If the Pentium 4 were to move away from the expensive Rambus platform, and twords the quicker DDR-SDRAM solutions, I would seriously think of buying a Pentium 4 when prices started to drop.

With that said, send all flames to mdockter@pcmech.com