The successor to Intel’s sixth-generation processors, including the Pentium II and Pentium III, this chip heralds the seventh generation of Intel processor technology. What is revolutionary about the is its deep pipelining architecture; it is implemented in 20 stages (compared to 10 in the Pentium III). This enables the chip to run at significantly higher clock speeds than the Pentium III, which could not be pushed beyond 1.2 GHz.
The Pentium 4’s design enables Intel engineers to keep increasing the chip’s clock speed to the point that this design tradeoff will become moot; experts believe that Intel will be able to push the s clock speed to as much as 15 GHz. Other improvements include system data bus speeds of up to 533 MHz when used with Rambus RDRAM memory, improved branch prediction, two arithmetic-logic units (ALU) that run at twice the chip’s clock speed, and an expanded set of Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE). See arithmetic-logic unit (ALU), Athlon, clock speed, Pentium III, Rambus DRAM, Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE).