Almost 18 months after AMD beat Intel to the speed of 1 GHz by a matter of days, Intel has managed to double that clock speed with the release of the 2.0 Ghz Pentium 4. Much has changed for Intel over the past 18 months as it’s 1 GHz processor was the ageing P6 based Pentium III, wheras it’s new 2.0 Ghz chip comes in the form of the Pentium 4, which is based upon the 9 month old NetBurst architecture. The jump from 1 to 2 Ghz appears to fit nicely with “Moore’s Law” which states that processors will double in power every 18 months. Whilst there is a jump in clock speed, it is somewhat more interesting to evaluate whether the Pentium 4 has allowed a doubling of computing power in this period.

Since we wrote about the Pentium 4 shortly after its release in November 2000, Intel has moved a great distance in establishing its new chip as the core of its processor strategy. As this article is being written in late August 2001, we can see that Intel has already marginalised the Pentium III processor line in readiness for a quick demise over the coming months. As Intel has had to aggressively move the Pentium 4 into the mainstream PC segment faster than had been previously planned, it has seen the Pentium III be effectively displaced as the premium “Pentium” brand processor. Effectively Intel will confine the P6 family of processors to the Celeron and some lower-end Xeon parts as the Pentium 4 moves into the mainstream.

This move to push the Pentium 4 into the mainstream has also been driven by the need for Intel to try and create a large clock speed gap between the Pentium 4 and the AMD Athlon. Intel is hoping that the clock speed gap between the Pentium 4 and Athlon processor lines will tempt consumers away from AMD and back to Intel.

Pentium 4 2.0 Ghz, what’s new?

There are not too many new innovations to be found with the new 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 when viewed next to existing members of the Pentium 4 range. Like existing parts, the new 2.0 Ghz chip is based upon the 0.18 micron “Willamette” core. The core features of the Pentium 4 are:

• Hyper pipelined architecture (i.e. 20 stage instruction pipelines)
  
  
• Advanced Dynamic Execution (i.e. improved branch prediction and hardware prefetch)
  
  
• Rapid Execution Engine (i.e. double-pumped ALU, allowing instructions to be processed on the rising and falling edge of the clock cycle)
  
  
• Trace cache
  
  
• 256 KB Level 2 cache
  
  
• SSE2

For a full explanation of all these features please refer to our original Pentium 4 article.

Effectively the 2.0 Ghz Pentium 4 is bearing the fruit of Intel’s NetBurst design philosophy in that a processor with extremely long instruction pipelines is capable of running at extremely high clock speeds. Intel has been able to reach 2 Ghz whilst using a 0.18 micron lithography process and at relative ease, which contrasts neatly to the difficulties the company experienced when trying to push the ageing P6 design to speeds of 1 Ghz and above. The 20-stage pipeline design has also allowed Intel to push the Pentium 4 to a 600 MHz clock speed lead over the nearest AMD Athlon which is currently running at a maximum speed of 1.4 Ghz.

The 2 Ghz Pentium 4 will be the last chip that Intel produces using the 0.18 micron “Willamette” core, before this gives way to the new 0.13 micron “Northwood” core later this year. Interestingly it appears that “Northwood” will not just be a shrink of the core (which brings with it reduced heat output and greater yields per wafer), but will also incorporate a Level 2 cache of 512 KB. The 2.2 Ghz Pentium 4 will be the first “Northwood” chip and could offer some interesting performance enhancements by virtue of its increased Level 2 cache size.

The only significant change that accompanies the release of the 2 Ghz Pentium 4 releates to the physical packaging of the chip itself. Since the launch of the Pentium 4 back in November 2000 the chip has been housed using a 423-pin PGA (Pin Grid Array) design (see picture below).

This has now changed in that Intel has moved away from the 423-pin PGA design to a new 478-pin micro PGA design as can be see in the picture below.

The main benefit of this design is that it allows for space to be conserved on the motherboard which would otherwise be taken up by the ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) Socket required to mount the CPU. This should help to reduce manufacturing costs for Pentium 4 motherboards.

Pentium 4 2.0 GHz - Page 2.