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With the P6 core reaching its final days of mass production, Intel ushered in the redesigned Pentium 4 as its new midrange flagship product. The Pentium 4 is an entirely new core built atop technologies never before implemented for an ×86 class processor, such as a double-speed integer execution unit, SSE2 streaming multimedia instructions, and a trace cache architecture. These new features yielded the highest performance processor available for most multimedia applications.
Despite these advanced technologies, the Pentium 4 platform has its shortcomings, due to its extremely long pipeline. The older Pentium 3 and AMD Athlon designs achieve better results for the broadest range of applications, at least as measured in per-MHz efficiency. The Pentium 4 must run at 2 GHz before it can outperform its competitors; even then, the difference is negligible for most desktop applications and games.
Considering this lack of per-MHz effectiveness, overclocking the Pentium 4 will help maximize performance. As with previous Intel designs, the P4 is multiplier locked. Worse, the Willamette is fabricated through a .18-micron process, which does not respond well to overclocking at the default core voltage. A 10% core voltage increase, combined with a massive cooling unit, can usually offer improvements in the 200 to 400 MHz range.
Actual performance returns across a variety of applications and benchmarks also need to be examined when overclocking the Pentium 4. Intel introduced a clock-throttling mechanism that can effectively power down segments of the processor's core during times of intense thermal load. This new feature is engineered to ensure stability for OEM systems that lack quality cooling configurations, though it can adversely affect overclocking performance for systems with inadequate cooling properties.
It should be noted that the Pentium 4 uses the 100-MHz Quad Data Rate bus, or QDR, which results in a 400-MHz FSB speed.
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