It’s the Pentium 4. That’s correct, 4. Not !!!!, IV, IIII, or Four, it’s called 4, the Arabic number 4. Intel changed it’s naming system for the first time since they last introduced a processor. Pentium II to Pentium !!! Those are exclamation points…if you don’t believe me, check out their website, or latest commercials. Back to the point, at least for a moment, Intel has officially released their Pentium 4 processor, which means we should see actual silicon in a couple of months, if not sooner. If you haven’t heard, the P4 is using a new core. The last time Intel did that was in 1995 with the Pentium Pro. Unlike this change, it’s coming with a lot of controversy. The Pentium 4 has been shown to perform worse than the P!!! at the same clock speed. This of course means that the P4 will need to clock up the clock speed in order to make up for it’s ungodly underperformance. It can do just that very easily thanks to it’s under performing core. Of course, there is one good side to all of this. Firstly, the Pentium 4’s tested were not the final silicon version, meaning that the Pentium 4s that are actually available for the Average Joe to buy might actually perform just as good as the P!!! at the same clock speed. Secondly, the Pentium 4 can go much faster than the Pentium!!! ever could have, so in the long run, we’ll see more performance. As always, only time can tell.

Quad Data Rate
Recently, there has been talk of Quad Data Rate SDRAM. This is what I see every time I hear “Quad Data Rate”:

“Double the data as a technology that has yet to be main stream, or even released.”

I can see advances this fast in things like ATA interfaces which are actually planning for the future, but the Memory directly plays a role in the overall speed of a system, and speeding it up this fast will just cause price fluctuations and a lot of pissed off users that bought DDR in it’s prime. If things keep up, I might have to simply give up on buying stuff until technology decides to slow down enough for me to get my money’s worth. Wait…who in the name of all that is devilish and Microsoft am I kidding? I’m going to buy anything new that comes out, and sell it the instant something newer comes out in order to raise funds for the new stuff. Why one might ask. The answer is simple: I am forced to do so. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to run the latest software, which means I wouldn’t be able to even view most of the internet, play the coolest games like Dawn or even run the next version of M$ Office (probably going to be named Microsoft Office.NET 1.0.)

I’m starting to wonder if I can get a hold of the person with the Microsoft Source code…I can make this person a very sweet deal, as long as he/she is comfortable making a deal with the Devil.