Today, we’re providing a closer look at what Intel called its fastest processor, the Pentium 4, which powers such successful products as the Apple iBook (13-inch, mid-2000), Nectar, and High-Performance Online Math.
Pentium 4:
Intel’s love affair with cores continues. The iBook and other designs with Pentium 4 processors rely on multiple cores to speed up performance and efficiency. Pentium 4 is a three-way microarchitecture, in which the Pentium 4 core comprises three stacked CPU cores.
The first two cores handle your computing-as-you-go tasks, while the last core handles most of the processing that the CPU needs to perform.
Pentium 4 (P4), a version of the Pentium 4 architecture, is the fastest processor Intel currently makes. Intel refers to its processors using their operating-system-level designation—like Pentium II, for example—but a general user knows which processor they are using.
This naming convention dates back to Intel’s Pentium Processor 3 operating system, launched in 1993.
What is Pentium 4? Definition and Meaning
Pentium 4 is actually a progression of the Pentium III architecture. Pentium III, and in particular Pentium II, was one of Intel’s first attempts at adding a fourth core to a Pentium processor.
The Pentium 4 series—Pentium 4 (P4), Pentium 4 (Sandy Bridge), and Pentium 4 (Ivy Bridge)—include the third and fourth generations of Pentium architecture. They have three physical cores each and are die-shrunk versions of the Pentium III architecture.
One thing that all Pentium processors share is their 64-bit architecture. All Intel processors from that date have 64-bit memory access. An octo-core P4 (or any P4/Ivy Bridge for that matter) has eight separate integer cores and four floating-point cores.
This arrangement has multiple advantages, including greater efficiency and some hardware-assisted performance boosts. If your processor has eight logical cores but only four physical cores, it can still run on the six logical cores.
But the more cores, the better. If the higher-end Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge processors are fast enough, they can speed up tasks that are handled exclusively by the physical cores. At the very least, Intel’s virtualization technology can help to offload some workloads.
Why does Intel claim that Pentium 4 CPUs are faster than Xeon and AMD?
One reason is that Intel markets Ivy Bridge as being a chip with “twice the performance of a Sandy Bridge.” The “twice” number implies that Sandy Bridge is a six-core Sandy Bridge that has six physical cores. The “twice” number implies that Ivy Bridge is four physical cores.
Since the “twice” is only double, and a Pentium 4 has only four physical cores, that means the “twice” number is actually doubled. This is supposed to be a bigger number, and so people have expected a Pentium 4 to have eight physical cores.
The more exact doubling number is actually six physical cores. Intel has called the architecture “Clover Trail,” which is a mid-range processor for desktops and servers, but they do not call it “Ivy Bridge.” The speed increase comes from increasing the cache size, which may help overall performance.
Pentium 4: Does Intel use the nomenclature Intel?
In the Pentium 4 chips, there are multiple name variations. The processors with a different version number are the “Clover Trail” versions. The model numbers are also distinct. Some have the number “4”; others have a two-digit number that starts with a four, three, or two.
The “Sandy Bridge” chips have a five-digit number; the “Ivy Bridge” chips have a seven-digit number. You can find them all on Intel’s Advanced Systems Guide (ASG) page.
It’s important to remember that an Intel processor is just another name for an “Assembled on X-Gene” (AX-Gene) chip, the basic chip design that houses all of the components of the system in one package.
There’s no one model of Intel processor. It’s just an integrated system-on-a-chip design. All Intel processors rely on this same basic design.
What is X-Gene?
Every Intel processor since the Pentium 4 chips has been based on the X-Gene technology. In fact, the X-Gene core is the main reason why Intel processors have followed the same basic design for their processors for many years. X-Gene is an acronym for “Extensible Binary Gene Architecture.” There’s another acronym for the X-Gene core, too: Foveros.
Foveros was announced in March 2012. Foveros takes the basic idea of the X-Gene core design and makes it work on a microarchitecture.
Each X-Gene processor gets a separate custom CPU core that can process different types of instructions but on the same CPU package.
In this scheme, each X-Gene core has eight 64-bit general-purpose CPUs. There are eight of these total cores. Two are dedicated to graphics processing; six are memory controllers; four are integer processing, and four are floating-point processors. These 128-bit wide internal interconnects are called Hypertransport. I try to explain to you What is Pentium 4? Definition and Meaning
Each X-Gene processor can access up to 2GB of memory, each in one of two flavors: DDR3 (running at 2133MHz) and DDR3-2133 (running at 2667MHz). This brings up the question of what speed Intel would claim the Pentium 4 is running.
If the Pentium 4 can reach 4GHz, then the Pentium 4 could theoretically reach up to 2400MHz using 2133MHz memory.
In fact, X-Gene was actually developed by AMD, and X-Gene-based processors ran on AMD motherboards. Intel took the most recent Pentium 4 processor, manufactured in 2012, and tuned the X-Gene cores to work in that chip
. The 2012 Pentium 4 chips were based on the same architecture as the original Pentium 4s, so they were compatible, but the processors were different designs.
What’s the difference between Intel and AMD?
Intel is not just working on another generation of processor core design. It has hundreds of products. Intel’s x86 processors range from low-end Atom products to high-end Xeon processors, to high-end Xeon Phi processors.
In order to enable each product to support the processor family’s features, the interconnect was architected to be flexible. This flexibility is similar to the flexible portability of a keyboard and a mouse, but it doesn’t allow one product to map to another.
Hope You know the answer Now: What is Pentium 4? Definition and Meaning
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