Intel Pentium 4 processor family

Intel Pentium 4 is a family of high-performance microprocessors that succeeded

Pentium III family. Pentium 4 CPUs are based on new NetBurst micro-architecture,
which differed significantly from P6 micro-architecture used in Pentium II/Pentium III
microprocessors. As an overall CPU performance is proportional to its frequency and
its efficiency, to achieve better performance levels many micro-architectures,
including P6, strike a delicate balance between faster CPU frequencies and
improved efficiency. The NetBurst microarchitecture used different approach - it
attempted to improve performance primarily by increasing CPU frequency, often at
at the expense of efficiency. One of key elements in this approach was "Hyper-
Pipelined Technology" - 20-stage pipeline (not counting decoder stages), that was
significantly longer than in previous generation of Pentium processors. While longer
pipelines are less efficient than shorter ones, they allow CPU core to reach higher
frequencies, and thus increase CPU performance. To improve efficiency of very
deep pipeline the Pentium 4 processors included new features: Trace Execution
Cache, Enhanced Branch prediction, and Quad Data Rate bus. Intel Pentium 4 CPUs
also included 144 new SIMD instructions called SSE2. Because the first generation
of Pentium 4 processors, based on Willamette core, proved to be performing not
significantly faster, and sometimes slower than the fastest Pentium III
microprocessors, Intel added more efficiency improvements to subsequent Pentium
4 core generations - larger size of level 2 cache, faster FSB frequency, SSE3
instruction set, and Hyper-Threading technology. Other features, that were
eventually added to the family, are 64-bit instruction set, and Virtualization
technology.