This sheads some light on intel...

[xequence]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4


To the surprise of industry observers, the Pentium 4 did not improve on the old P6 design in either of the normal two key performance measures: integer processing speed or floating-point performance. Instead, it sacrificed per-cycle performance in order to gain two things: very high clockspeeds, and SSE performance.


Intel used a deep instruction pipeline to implement this goal, which reduced the amount of real work that the Pentium 4 could do per clock cycle, compared to other CPUs like the Pentium III and Athlon.


On the test-bench, the Willamette was somewhat disappointing to analysts in that not only was it unable to outperform the Athlon and the highest-clocked P-IIIs in all testing situations, it was clearly not superior to even the low-end AMD Duron

So, basically, they make P4s look better then they are, which makes them worse. I doubt ill get my new computer with a pentium... I probably wasnt going to anyway, but if I couldent get an AMD, id settle for an intel. Not anymore.

Wow. This line really hits it home:

Also of concern was the fact that reviews showed in extreme cases it took a 5.2 GHz Prescott core to match the performance of an Athlon FX-55 that clocked at 2.6 GHz [5].

[mstlyevil]

Pentium 4 does do some thing better than a single core AMD processor. Hyprtheading does improve performance on mutithreaded apps when compared to a equvilent AMD processor. I think the article exagerates the performance differences between the two platforms. If you buy a P4 EE Prescott, they perform in gaming very close to the FX-57 in most benchmarking applications. But they also perform close to the A64 3500, 3700, 3800 and 4000 making them not very cost effective for gaming. If AMD or Intel did not have dual core solutions, you would need a P4 for multimedia, video editing and multitasking enviroments. This is wikipedia we are talking about and you can not take everything they post and quote that as the gospel truth.

[xequence]

I believe wikipedia, 'cause I doubt britannica has more then a paragraph on pentiums let alone pentium 4s :P

Wait. Let me check.




Pentium

Family of microprocessors developed by Intel Corp.



Introduced in 1993 as the successor to Intel's 80486 microprocessor, the Pentium contained two processors on a single chip and about 3.3 million transistors. Using a CISC (complex instruction set computer) architecture, its main features were a 32-bit address bus, a 64-bit data bus, built-in floating-point and memory-management units, and two 8KB caches. It was available with processor speeds ranging from 60 megahertz (MHz) to 200 MHz. The Pentium quickly became the processor of choice for personal computers. It was superseded by ever faster and more powerful processors, the Pentium Pro (1995), the Pentium II (1997), the Pentium III (1999), and the Pentium 4 (2000).

From britannica ready reference 2006.

[mstlyevil]

I believe wikipedia, 'cause I doubt britannica has more then a paragraph on pentiums let alone pentium 4s :P

Wait. Let me check.



From britannica ready reference 2006.

Wikipedia has had controversy because everyone and their grandma can post on it. You do know that misinformation on wikipedia has been in the news lately? It is a Wiki first and foremost and cannot be trusted without other sources to back up what is posted on it. BTW, Britanica has had problems with misinformation too.

[prizrak]

P4 sux, Pentium M is a real nice CPU even for desktops although it was meant for laptops originally. Does AMD have a good performance CPU for laptops that is also light on the battery?

[mstlyevil]

P4 sux, Pentium M is a real nice CPU even for desktops although it was meant for laptops originally. Does AMD have a good performance CPU for laptops that is also light on the battery?

Not really, this is one area where they are lacking. AMD 64 chips do not do all that bad with laptops but are no where near Intel when it comes to being light on the battery.

[briancurtin]

I believe wikipedia
for what reason?

i believe them for the most part, but like was said before, anyone could edit that page and put in false information. it has been done before. if anything, wikipedia should be used as a building block to finding information, not the be-all-end-all source of solid information. i know you didnt do that here, its just a thread on a message board, but i personally wouldnt put my money on wikipedia being the best source when talking about anything that has two sides to it.

[mcduck]

Yes, the wikipedia article tells exactly the same thing I've found out over last few years from many hardware tests and articles. Intel made a mistake with P4, they hoped that they can reach much higher CPU speeds and that would have solved the problem with less done per single clock cycle. In the end this didn't happen, and single core CPU's are at the point where higher clock speeds are becoming impossible to reach. This is the reason why both Intel and AMD are heading towards multicore CPUs. P4 also draws huge amounts of power when running at 100%..

I also tend to dislike companies not playing fair game. Intel has forced many computer manufacturers to drop products using AMD CPUs by threatening that if they sell any AMD based machines they won't get any Intel CPU's any more. They have been sued for this in Japan at least, and if I remember right in USA too.. Also, Intel compiler is known to intentionally make programs run worse on AMD CPU's.

This is not to say that P4 sucks, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone as in most cases AMD CPU's perform better, and cost less too.