Out of touch at any speed

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Author: JT Smith

32bitsonline: “Nothing epitomizes the out of touch excess more than the Pentium 4. It’s huge die sizes means that it would not be a competitively priced
with Athlon processors and the sibling Pentium III. It’s 20 stage hyperpipelined design was maximized for sheer MHz, not efficient,
instructions per cycle processing. As a result, running on present real world applications, a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 is slower than a 1.2GHz
Athlon, and in some cases, a 1GHz Pentium III. All for much more bucks. Because of a political—not necessarily for the consumer’s best
interest—it had to be tied to a RAMBUS memory system that still costs 3 times more than an SDRAM equivalent.”

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