Pentium 4[3][4] is a series of single-core CPUs for desktops, laptops and entry-level servers manufactured by Intel. The processors were shipped from November 20, 2000 until August 8, 2008.[5][6] All Pentium 4 CPUs are based on the NetBurst microarchitecture, the successor to the P6.
The Pentium 4 Willamette (180nm) introduced SSE2, while the Prescott (90nm) introduced SSE3 and later 64-bit technology. Later versions introduced Hyper-Threading Technology (HTT). The first Pentium 4-branded processor to implement 64-bit was the Prescott (90nm) (February 2004), but this feature was not enabled. Intel subsequently began selling 64-bit Pentium 4s using the "E0" revision of the Prescotts, being sold on the OEM market as the Pentium 4, model F. The E0 revision also adds eXecute Disable (XD) (Intel's name for the NX bit) to Intel64. Intel's official launch of Intel64 (under the name EM64T at that time) in mainstream desktop processors was the N0 stepping Prescott-2M.
Intel also marketed a version of their low-end Celeron processors based on the NetBurst microarchitecture (often referred to as Celeron 4), and a high-end derivative, Xeon, intended for multi-socket servers and workstations. In 2005, the Pentium 4 was complemented by the more advanced dual-core-brands Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition, all were succeeded at the top range by the Core 2 brand, while production continued until 2008,[7] with Pentium 4 replaced by Pentium Dual-Core.[8]
In benchmark evaluations, the advantages of the NetBurst microarchitecture were unclear. With carefully optimized application code, the first Pentium 4s outperformed Intel's fastest Pentium III (clocked at 1.13GHz at the time), as expected. But in legacy applications with many branching or x87 floating-point instructions, the Pentium 4 would merely match or run slower than its predecessor. Its main downfall was a shared unidirectional bus. The NetBurst microarchitecture consumed more power and emitted more heat than any previous Intel or AMD microarchitectures.
As a result, the Pentium 4's introduction was met with mixed reviews: Developers disliked the Pentium 4, as it posed a new set of code optimization rules. For example, in mathematical applications, AMD's lower-clocked Athlon (the fastest-clocked model was clocked at 1.2GHz at the time) easily outperformed the Pentium 4, which would only catch up if software was re-compiled with SSE2 support. Tom Yager of Infoworld magazine called it "the fastest CPU–for programs that fit entirely in cache". Computer-savvy buyers avoided Pentium 4 PCs due to their price premium, questionable benefit, and initial restriction to Rambus' RDRAM.[9][10][11] In terms of product marketing, the Pentium 4's singular emphasis on clock frequency (above all else) made it a marketer's dream.[12] The result of this was that the NetBurst microarchitecture was often referred to as a marchitecture[13] by various computing websites and publications during the life of the Pentium 4. It was also called "NetBust",[14][13] a term popular with reviewers who reflected negatively upon the processor's performance.
The two classical metrics of CPU performance are instructions per cycle (IPC) and clock speed. While IPC is difficult to quantify due to dependence on the benchmark application's instruction mix, clock speed is a simple measurement yielding a single absolute number. Unsophisticated buyers would simply consider the processor with the highest clock speed to be the best product, and the Pentium 4 had the fastest clock speed. Because AMD's processors had slower clock speeds, it countered Intel's marketing advantage with the "megahertz myth" campaign. AMD product marketing used a "PR-rating" system, which assigned a merit value based on relative performance to a baseline machine.
Pentium 4 Willamette 1.5GHz on Socket 423Pentium 4 Prescott 2.4GHz on Socket 478Pentium 4 HT Prescott 3.0GHz on Socket 478
At the launch of the Pentium 4, Intel stated that NetBurst-based processors were expected to scale to 10GHz[15] after several fabrication process generations. However, the clock speed of processors using the NetBurst microarchitecture reached a maximum of 3.8GHz. Intel had not anticipated a rapid upward scaling of transistor power leakage that began to occur as the die reached the 90nm lithography and smaller. This new power leakage phenomenon, along with the standard thermal output, created cooling and clock scaling problems as clock speeds increased. Reacting to these unexpected obstacles, Intel attempted several core redesigns (Prescott most notably) and explored new manufacturing technologies, such as using multiple cores, increasing FSB speeds, increasing the cache size, and using a longer instruction pipeline along with higher clock speeds.
The code cache was replaced by a trace cache which contained decoded microoperations rather than instructions with advantage of eliminating instruction decoding bottleneck so that the design can use RISC technology.[16]:48 This came with a disadvantage of less compact cache taking up more chip space and consuming power.[16]:48
These solutions failed, and from 2003 to 2005, Intel shifted development away from NetBurst to focus on the cooler-running Pentium M microarchitecture. On January 5, 2006, Intel launched the Core processors, which put greater emphasis on energy efficiency and performance per clock cycle. The final NetBurst-derived products were released in 2007, with all subsequent product families switching exclusively to the Core microarchitecture.[citation needed]
Testing and validation
According to Bob Bentley, presenting on behalf of Intel at the 38th annual Design Automation Conference, "The microarchitecture of the Pentium 4 processor is significantly more complex than any previous IA-32 microprocessor, so the challenge of validating the logical correctness of the design in a timely fashion was indeed a daunting one." He hired a team of 60 recent graduates to help with testing and validation.[17]
Pentium 4 processors have an integrated heat spreader (IHS) that prevents the die from accidentally being damaged when mounting and unmounting cooling solutions. Prior to the IHS, a CPU shim was some times used by people worried about damaging the core. Overclockers sometimes removed the IHS from Socket 423 and Socket 478 chips to allow for more direct heat transfer. On Socket 478 Prescott processors and processors using the Socket LGA 775 (Socket T) interface, the IHS is directly soldered to the die or dies, making it difficult to remove.
Willamette
Pentium 4 Willamette 1.5GHz boxedPentium 4 Willamette 1.5GHz for Socket 423Pentium4 1.5GHz (Willamette) with Intel 850 chipset
Pentium 4 Willamette (Socket 478), top and bottom side showing contact pins
Willamette, the project codename for the first NetBurst microarchitecture implementation, experienced long delays in the completion of its design process. The project was started in 1998, when Intel saw the Pentium II as their permanent line. At that time, the Willamette core was expected to operate at frequencies up to about 1GHz. However, the Pentium III was released while Willamette was still being finished. Due to the radical differences between the P6 and NetBurst microarchitectures, Intel could not market Willamette as a Pentium III, so it was marketed as the Pentium 4.
On November 20, 2000, Intel released the Willamette-based Pentium 4 clocked at 1.4 and 1.5GHz. Most industry experts regarded the initial release as a stopgap product, introduced before it was truly ready. According to these experts, the Pentium 4 was released because the competing Thunderbird-based AMD Athlon was outperforming the aging Pentium III, and further improvements to the Pentium III were not yet possible.[citation needed] This Pentium 4 was produced using a 180nm process and initially used Socket 423 (also called socket W, for "Willamette"), with later revisions moving to Socket 478 (socket N, for "Northwood"). These variants were identified by the Intel product codes 80528 and 80531 respectively.
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 Pentium IIIs in all testing situations, but it was not superior to the budget segment's AMD Duron.[18] Although introduced at prices of $644 (1.4GHz) and $819 (1.5GHz) for 1000 quantities to OEM PC manufacturers[citation needed] (prices for models for the consumer market varied by retailer), it sold at a modest but respectable rate, handicapped somewhat by the requirement for relatively fast yet expensive Rambus Dynamic RAM (RDRAM). The Pentium III remained Intel's top selling processor line, with the Athlon also selling slightly better than the Pentium 4. While Intel bundled two RDRAM modules with each boxed Pentium 4, it did not facilitate Pentium 4 sales and was not considered a true solution by many.
In January 2001, a still slower 1.3GHz model was added to the range, but over the next twelve months, Intel gradually started reducing AMD's leadership in performance. In April 2001 a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 was launched, the first model to provide performance clearly superior to the old Pentium III. July saw 1.6 and 1.8GHz models and in August 2001, Intel released 1.9 and 2GHz Pentium 4s. In the same month, they released the 845 chipset that supported much cheaper PC133 SDRAM instead of RDRAM.[19] The fact that SDRAM was so much cheaper caused the Pentium 4's sales to grow considerably.[19] The new chipset allowed the Pentium 4 to quickly replace the Pentium III, becoming the top-selling mainstream processor on the market.
The Willamette code name is derived from the Willamette Valley region of Oregon, where a large number of Intel's manufacturing facilities are located.[citation needed]
Northwood
A 'Northwood' core Pentium 4 processor. At left is the die (black square in the center), and at right the heat spreader.Die shot of a Northwood Pentium 4
In January 2002, Intel released Pentium 4s with a new core codenamed Northwood at speeds of 1.6GHz, 1.8GHz, 2GHz and 2.2GHz.[20][21] Northwood (product code 80532) combined an increase in the L2 cache size from 256KB to 512KB (increasing the transistor count from 42 million to 55 million) with a transition to a new 130 nm fabrication process.[21] Making the processor out of smaller transistors means that it can run at higher clock speeds and produce less heat. In the same month boards utilizing the 845 chipset were released with enabled support for DDR SDRAM which provided double the bandwidth of PC133 SDRAM, and alleviated the associated high costs of using Rambus RDRAM for maximal performance with Pentium 4.[citation needed]
A 2.4GHz Pentium 4 was released on April 2, 2002, and the bus speed increased from 400MT/s to 533MT/s (133MHz physical clock) for the 2.26GHz, 2.4GHz, and 2.53GHz models in May, 2.66GHz and 2.8GHz models in August, and 3.06GHz model in November. With Northwood, the Pentium 4 came of age. The battle for performance leadership remained competitive (as AMD introduced faster versions of the Athlon XP) but most observers agreed that the fastest-clocked Northwood-based Pentium 4 was usually ahead of its rival.[citation needed] This was particularly so in mid-2002, when AMD's changeover to its 130nm production process did not help the initial "Thoroughbred A" revision Athlon XP CPUs to clock high enough to overcome the advantages of Northwood in the 2.4 to 2.8GHz range.[22]
The 3.06GHz Pentium 4 enabled Hyper-Threading Technology that was first supported in Foster-based Xeons. This began the convention of virtual processors (or virtual cores) under x86 by enabling multiple threads to be run at the same time on the same physical processor. By shuffling two (ideally differing) program instructions to simultaneously execute through a single physical processor core, the goal is to best utilize processor resources that would have otherwise been unused from the traditional approach of having these single instructions wait for each other to execute singularly through the core. This initial 3.06GHz 533FSB Pentium 4 Hyper-Threading enabled processor was known as Pentium 4 HT and was introduced to mass market by Gateway in November 2002.
On April 14, 2003, Intel officially launched the new Pentium 4 HT processor. This processor used an 800MT/s FSB (200MHz physical clock), was clocked at 3GHz, and had Hyper-Threading technology.[23] This was meant to help the Pentium 4 better compete with AMD's Opteron line of processors. Meanwhile, with the launch of the Athlon XP 3200+ in AMD's desktop line, AMD increased the Athlon XP's FSB speed from 333MT/s to 400MT/s, but it was not enough to hold off the new 3GHz Pentium 4 HT.[24]
The Pentium 4 HT's increase to a 200MHz quad-pumped bus (200x 4 = 800MHz effective) greatly helped to satisfy the bandwidth requirements the NetBurst architecture desired for reaching optimal performance. While the Athlon XP architecture was less dependent on bandwidth, the bandwidth numbers reached by Intel were well out of range for the Athlon's EV6 bus. Hypothetically, EV6 could have achieved the same bandwidth numbers, but only at speeds unreachable at the time. Intel's higher bandwidth proved useful in benchmarks for streaming operations[citation needed], and Intel marketing wisely capitalized on this as a tangible improvement over AMD's desktop processors[citation needed]. Northwood 2.4GHz, 2.6GHz and 2.8GHz variants were released on May 21, 2003. A 3.2GHz variant was launched on June 23, 2003 and the final 3.4GHz version arrived on February 2, 2004.
Overclocking early stepping Northwood cores yielded a startling phenomenon. While core voltage approaching 1.7 V and above would often allow substantial additional gains in overclocking headroom, the processor would slowly (over several months or even weeks) become more unstable over time with a degradation in maximum stable clock speed before dying and becoming totally unusable. This became known as Sudden Northwood Death Syndrome (SNDS), which was caused by electromigration.[25]
Pentium 4 M
Also based on the Northwood core, the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor - M[26] (also known as the Pentium 4 M) was released on April 23, 2002, and included Intel's SpeedStep and Deeper Sleep technologies. Its TDP is about 35 watts in most applications. This lowered power consumption was due to lowered core voltage, and other features mentioned previously.
Unlike the desktop Pentium 4, the Pentium 4 M did not feature an integrated heat spreader (IHS), and it operates at a lower voltage. The lower voltage means lower power consumption, and in turn less heat. However, according to Intel specifications, the Pentium 4 M had a maximum thermal junction temperature rating of 100 degrees C, approximately 40 degrees higher than the desktop Pentium 4.
Mobile Pentium 4
The Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor[27] was released to address the problem of putting a full desktop Pentium 4 processor into a laptop, which some manufacturers were doing[citation needed]. The Mobile Pentium 4 used a 533MT/s FSB, following the desktop Pentium 4's evolution. Oddly, increasing the bus speed by 133MT/s (33MHz) caused a massive increase in TDPs, as mobile Pentium 4 processors emitted 59.8–70W of heat, with the Hyper-Threading variants emitting 66.1–88W. This allowed the mobile Pentium 4 to bridge the gap between the desktop Pentium 4 (up to 115W TDP), and the Pentium 4 M (up to 35W TDP).
Intel's naming conventions made it difficult at the time of the processor's release to identify the processor model. There was the Pentium III mobile chip, the Pentium 4 M, the Mobile Pentium 4, and then the Pentium M, which itself was based on the Pentium III and was significantly faster and more power-efficient than the former three.
Northwood (Extreme Edition)
In September 2003, at the Intel Developer Forum, the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (P4EE) was announced, just over a week before the launch of Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX. The design was mostly identical to Pentium 4 (to the extent that it would run in the same motherboards), but differed by an added 2MB of level 3 cache. It shared the same Gallatin core as the Xeon MP, though in a Socket 478 form factor (as opposed to Socket 603 for the Xeon MP) and with an 800MT/s bus, twice as fast as that of the Xeon MP.
The 1st Extreme Edition Demoed Computer
While Intel maintained that the Extreme Edition was aimed at gamers, critics viewed it as an attempt to steal the Athlon 64's launch thunder, nicknaming it the "Emergency Edition".[28] With a price tag of $1000, it was also referred to as the "Expensive Edition" and "Extremely Expensive".[29]
The added cache generally resulted in a noticeable performance increase in most processor intensive applications. Multimedia encoding and certain games benefited the most, with the Extreme Edition outperforming the Pentium 4, and even the two Athlon 64 variants, although the lower price and more balanced performance of the Athlon 64 (particularly the non-FX version) led to it usually being seen as the better value proposition. Nonetheless, the Extreme Edition did achieve Intel's apparent aim, which was to prevent AMD from being the performance champion with the new Athlon 64, which was winning every single major benchmark over the existing Pentium 4s.
In January 2004, a 3.4GHz version was released for Socket 478, and in Summer 2004 the CPU was released using the new Socket 775 (LGA 775). A slight performance increase was achieved in late 2004 by increasing the bus speed from 800MT/s to 1066MT/s, resulting in a 3.46GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. By most metrics, this was on a per-clock basis the fastest single-core NetBurst processor that was ever produced, even outperforming many of its successor chips (not counting the dual-core Pentium D). Afterwards, the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition was migrated to the Prescott core. The new 3.73GHz Extreme Edition had the same features as a 6x0-sequence Prescott 2M, but with a 1066MT/s bus. In practice however, the 3.73GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition almost always proved to be slower than the 3.46GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, which is most likely due to the lack of an L3 cache and the longer instruction pipeline. The only advantage the 3.73GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition had over the 3.46GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition was the ability to run 64-bit applications since all Gallatin-based Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processors lacked the Intel 64 (then known as EM64T) instruction set.
Although never a particularly good seller, especially since it was released in a time when AMD was asserting near total dominance in the processor performance race, the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition established a new position within Intel's product line, that of an enthusiast oriented chip with the highest-end specifications offered by Intel chips, along with unlocked multipliers to allow for easier overclocking. In this role it has since been succeeded by the Pentium Extreme Edition (The Extreme version of the dual-core Pentium D), the Core 2 Extreme, the Core i7 and the Core i9.
Contrary to popular belief, however, the Socket 478 versions of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPUs such as the Gallatin-based Pentium 4 Extreme Edition for Socket 478 all have a locked multiplier, meaning that they are not overclockable unless the front-side bus speeds are increased (which runs the potential risks of erratic behaviors such as reliability and stability issues). Only the Socket 775/LGA 775 versions of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, as well as the Pentium Extreme Edition (Smithfield) and Engineering Sample CPUs have unlocked multipliers.
Prescott
Pentium 4 2.40A– PrescottIntel Pentium 4 640 die shot
On February 1, 2004, Intel introduced a new core codenamed Prescott. The core used the 90 nm process for the first time, which one analyst described as "a major reworking of the Pentium 4's microarchitecture."[30] Despite this overhaul, the performance gains were inconsistent. Some programs benefited from Prescott's doubled cache and SSE3 instructions, whereas others were harmed by its longer pipeline. The Prescott's microarchitecture allowed slightly higher clock speeds, but not nearly as high as Intel had anticipated. The fastest mass-produced Prescott-based Pentium 4s were clocked at 3.8GHz. While Northwood ultimately achieved clock speeds 70% higher than Willamette, Prescott only scaled 12% beyond Northwood. Prescott's inability to achieve greater clock speeds was attributed to the very high power consumption and heat output of the processor. This led to the processor receiving the nickname "PresHot" on forums.[31] In fact, Prescott's power and heat characteristics were only slightly higher than those of Northwood of the same speed and nearly equal to the Gallatin-based Extreme Editions, but since those processors had already been operating near the limits of what was considered thermally acceptable, this still posed a major issue.[32]
The release of Prescott also coincided with the launch of LGA 775 and the BTX form factor, which were also criticized. Tests showed that a given Pentium 4 made for LGA 775 consumed more power and produced more heat than the exact same chip in a socket 478 package. The BTX form factor, meanwhile, showed signs of having been designed for the sole purpose of managing the Prescott's heat output at the expense of other components and concerns, such as blowing hot air from the CPU directly into the graphics card's heatsink/fan. These magnified the perception of Prescott as an excessively hot chip.
The Prescott Pentium 4 contains 125 million transistors and has a die area of 112mm2.[33][34] It was fabricated in a 90nm process with seven levels of copper interconnect.[34] The process has features such as strained silicon transistors and low-κ carbon-doped silicon oxide (CDO) dielectric, which is also known as organosilicate glass (OSG).[34] The Prescott was first fabricated at the D1C development fab and was later moved to F11X production fab.[34]
Originally, Intel released two Prescott lines on Socket 478: the E-series, with an 800MT/s FSB and Hyper-Threading support, and the low-end A-series, with a 533MT/s FSB and Hyper-Threading disabled. LGA 775 Prescott CPUs use a rating system, labeling them as the 5xx series (Celeron Ds are the 3xx series, while Pentium Ms are the 7xx series). The LGA 775 version of the E-series uses model numbers 5x0 (520–560), and the LGA 775 version of the A-series uses model numbers 5x5 and 5x9 (505–519). The fastest, the 570J and 571, is clocked at 3.8GHz. Plans to mass-produce a 4GHz Pentium 4 were cancelled by Intel in favor of dual core processors, although some European retailers claimed to be selling a Pentium 4 580, clocked at 4GHz. The E-series Prescott, as well as the low-end 517 and 524, incorporates Hyper-Threading in order to speed up some processes that use multithreaded software, such as video editing.
The Prescott microarchitecture was designed to support Intel 64, Intel's implementation of the AMD-developed x86-64 64-bit extensions to the x86 architecture, but the initial models shipped with their 64-bit capability disabled. Intel stated that it did not intend to release 64-bit CPUs in retail channels, instead releasing the 64-bit capable F-series to OEMs only.[35] However, they were later made available to the general public as the 5x1 series. A number of low-end Intel 64-enabled Prescotts, with 533MHz FSB speed, were also released.
The E0 stepping of the Prescott series introduced the XD bit feature.[36] This technology, introduced to the x86 architecture by AMD as NX (No eXecute), can help prevent certain types of malicious code from exploiting a buffer overflow to get executed. Models supporting XD bit include the 5x0J and 5x1 series as well as the low-end 5x5J and 5x6.
The Prescott processors are the first to support SSE3, along with all Pentium D processors.
Prescott 2M (Extreme Edition)
Intel, by the first quarter of 2005, released a new Prescott core with 6x0 numbering, codenamed Prescott 2M. It is also sometimes known by the name of its Xeon derivative, Irwindale.[37] It features Hyper-Threading, Intel 64, the XDbit, EIST (Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology), Thermal Monitor 2 (for processors at 3.6GHz and above), and 2MB of L2 cache. However, AnandTech found that this resulted in 17% higher cache latency compared to Prescott, which combined with the lack of consumer-targeted programs requiring more cache, largely negated the advantage that added cache introduced.[38] Rather than being a targeted speed boost the double size cache was intended to provide the same space and hence performance for 64-bit mode operations, due to the doubled word size compared to 32-bit mode.
On November 14, 2005, Intel released Prescott 2M processors with VT (Virtualization Technology, codenamed Vanderpool) enabled. Intel only released two models of this Prescott 2M category: 662 and 672, running at 3.6GHz and 3.8GHz, respectively.[39][40]
Cedar Mill
Pentium 4 HT 651 3.4GHz
The final revision of the Pentium 4 was Cedar Mill, released on January 5, 2006. This was a die shrink of the Prescott-based 600 series core to 65 nm, with no real feature additions but significantly reduced power consumption. The Cedar Mill is closely linked to the Pentium D Presler revision, with each Presler CPU consisting of two Cedar Mill cores on the same chip package.[41] Cedar Mill had a lower heat output than Prescott, with a TDP of 86W. The D0 stepping in late 2006 reduced this to 65 watts. It has a 65nm core and features the same 31-stage pipeline as Prescott, 800MT/s FSB, Intel 64, Hyper-Threading, but no Virtualization Technology. As with Prescott 2M, Cedar Mill also has a 2MB L2cache.
Intel initially announced four VT-x enabled Cedar Mill processors with model numbers 633 to 663,[42] but these were later cancelled and replaced by models 631 to 661 without VT-x, the extra 1 added to the model number distinguishing them from the 90nm Prescott cores operating at the same frequencies.[43] Cedar Mill processors ranged in frequency from 3.0 to 3.6GHz, down from the 3.8GHz maximum of the Prescott-based 670 and 672. Overclockers managed to exceed 8GHz with these processors using liquid nitrogen cooling.[44]
In March 2003, the Pentium 4 M (the mobile version of the Pentium 4) was discontinued after suffering from heat and power consumption problems and was replaced by the P6-based Pentium M. The Pentium M forms a part of the Centrino platform-marketing brand throughout the 2000s.
In May 2005, Intel released dual-core processors under the Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition brands. These came under the code names Smithfield and Presler for the 90nm and 65nm parts respectively.
The original successor to the Pentium 4 was (codenamed) Tejas, which was scheduled for an early-mid-2005 release. However, it was cancelled a few months after the release of Prescott due to extremely high TDPs (a 2.8GHz Tejas emitted 150W of heat, compared to around 80W for a Northwood of the same speed, and 100W for a comparably clocked Prescott) and development on the NetBurst microarchitecture as a whole ceased, with the exception of the dual-core Pentium D, Pentium Extreme Edition and the Cedar Mill-based Pentium 4 HT.
The real successor to the Pentium 4 brand is the Pentium Dual-Core brand, released in 2006. The first chips implementing it (in 65nm) were released in January 2007 with the Yonah mobile processors and are based on the Enhanced Pentium M architecture, in June 3, 2007 with the Allendale (and later Conroe) desktop processors and in late 2007 with the Merom mobile processors, with the underlying microarchitecture being the Core microarchitecture.
Athlon is the brand name applied to a series of x86-compatible microprocessors designed and manufactured by AMD. The original Athlon was the first seventh-generation x86 processor and the first desktop processor to reach speeds of one gigahertz (GHz). It made its debut as AMD's high-end processor brand on June 23, 1999. Over the years AMD has used the Athlon name with the 64-bit Athlon 64 architecture, the Athlon II, and Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) chips targeting the Socket AM1 desktop SoC architecture, and Socket AM4 Zen (microarchitecture). The modern Zen-based Athlon with a Radeon Graphics processor was introduced in 2019 as AMD's highest-performance entry-level processor.
Duron is a line of budget x86-compatible microprocessors manufactured by AMD and released on June 19, 2000. Duron was intended to be a lower-cost offering to complement AMD's then mainstream performance Athlon processor line, and it also competed with rival chipmaker Intel's Pentium III and Celeron processor offerings. The Duron brand name was retired in 2004, succeeded by AMD's Sempron line of processors as their budget offering.
Celeron is a series of IA-32 and x86-64 computer microprocessors targeted at low-cost personal computers, manufactured by Intel from 1998 until 2023.
The Pentium III brand refers to Intel's 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile CPUs based on the sixth-generation P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 28, 1999. The brand's initial processors were very similar to the earlier Pentium II-branded processors. The most notable differences were the addition of the Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) instruction set, and the introduction of a controversial serial number embedded in the chip during manufacturing.
The Athlon 64 is a ninth-generation, AMD64-architecture microprocessor produced by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), released on September 23, 2003. It is the third processor to bear the name Athlon, and the immediate successor to the Athlon XP. The Athlon 64 was the second processor to implement the AMD64 architecture and the first 64-bit processor targeted at the average consumer. Variants of the Athlon 64 have been produced for Socket 754, Socket 939, Socket 940, and Socket AM2. It was AMD's primary consumer CPU, and primarily competed with Intel's Pentium 4, especially the Prescott and Cedar Mill core revisions.
Tejas was a code name for Intel's microprocessor, which was to be a successor to the latest Pentium 4 with the Prescott core and was sometimes referred to as Pentium V. Jayhawk was a code name for its Xeon counterpart. The cancellation of the processors in May 2004 underscored Intel's historical transition of its focus on single-core processors to multi-core processors.
Xeon is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same architecture as regular desktop-grade CPUs, but have advanced features such as support for error correction code (ECC) memory, higher core counts, more PCI Express lanes, support for larger amounts of RAM, larger cache memory and extra provision for enterprise-grade reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features responsible for handling hardware exceptions through the Machine Check Architecture (MCA). They are often capable of safely continuing execution where a normal processor cannot due to these extra RAS features, depending on the type and severity of the machine-check exception (MCE). Some also support multi-socket systems with two, four, or eight sockets through use of the Ultra Path Interconnect (UPI) bus, which replaced the older QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) bus.
The NetBurst microarchitecture, called P68 inside Intel, was the successor to the P6 microarchitecture in the x86 family of central processing units (CPUs) made by Intel. The first CPU to use this architecture was the Willamette-core Pentium 4, released on November 20, 2000 and the first of the Pentium 4 CPUs; all subsequent Pentium 4 and Pentium D variants have also been based on NetBurst. In mid-2001, Intel released the Foster core, which was also based on NetBurst, thus switching the Xeon CPUs to the new architecture as well. Pentium 4-based Celeron CPUs also use the NetBurst architecture.
LGA 775, also known as Socket T, is an Intel desktop CPU socket. Unlike PGA CPU sockets, such as its predecessor Socket 478, LGA 775 has no socket holes; instead, it has 775 protruding pins which touch contact points on the underside of the processor (CPU).
Pentium D is a range of desktop 64-bit x86-64 processors based on the NetBurst microarchitecture, which is the dual-core variant of the Pentium 4 manufactured by Intel. Each CPU comprised two cores. The brand's first processor, codenamed Smithfield and manufactured on the 90 nm process, was released on May 25, 2005, followed by the 65 nm Presler nine months later. The core implementation on the 90 nm Smithfield and later 65 nm Presler are designed differently but are functionally the same. The 90 nm Smithfield contains a single die, with two adjoined but functionally separate CPU cores cut from the same wafer. The later 65 nm Presler utilized a multi-chip module package, where two discrete dies each containing a single core reside on the CPU substrate. Neither the 90 nm Smithfield nor the 65 nm Presler were capable of direct core to core communication, relying instead on the northbridge link to send information between the two cores.
The Athlon 64 X2 is the first native dual-core desktop central processing unit (CPU) designed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). It was designed from scratch as native dual-core by using an already multi-CPU enabled Athlon 64, joining it with another functional core on one die, and connecting both via a shared dual-channel memory controller/north bridge and additional control logic. The initial versions are based on the E stepping model of the Athlon 64 and, depending on the model, have either 512 or 1024 KB of L2 cache per core. The Athlon 64 X2 can decode instructions for Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (SSE3), except those few specific to Intel's architecture. The first Athlon 64 X2 CPUs were released in May 2005, in the same month as Intel's first dual-core processor, the Pentium D.
The P6 microarchitecture is the sixth-generation Intel x86 microarchitecture, implemented by the Pentium Pro microprocessor that was introduced in November 1995. It is frequently referred to as i686. It was planned to be succeeded by the NetBurst microarchitecture used by the Pentium 4 in 2000, but was revived for the Pentium M line of microprocessors. The successor to the Pentium M variant of the P6 microarchitecture is the Core microarchitecture which in turn is also derived from P6.
The Intel Core microarchitecture is a multi-core processor microarchitecture launched by Intel in mid-2006. It is a major evolution over the Yonah, the previous iteration of the P6 microarchitecture series which started in 1995 with Pentium Pro. It also replaced the NetBurst microarchitecture, which suffered from high power consumption and heat intensity due to an inefficient pipeline designed for high clock rate. In early 2004 the new version of NetBurst (Prescott) needed very high power to reach the clocks it needed for competitive performance, making it unsuitable for the shift to dual/multi-core CPUs. On May 7, 2004 Intel confirmed the cancellation of the next NetBurst, Tejas and Jayhawk. Intel had been developing Merom, the 64-bit evolution of the Pentium M, since 2001, and decided to expand it to all market segments, replacing NetBurst in desktop computers and servers. It inherited from Pentium M the choice of a short and efficient pipeline, delivering superior performance despite not reaching the high clocks of NetBurst.
The AMD Family 10h, or K10, is a microprocessor microarchitecture by AMD based on the K8 microarchitecture. The first third-generation Opteron products for servers were launched on September 10, 2007, with the Phenom processors for desktops following and launching on November 11, 2007 as the immediate successors to the K8 series of processors.
Yonah is the code name of Intel's first generation 65 nm process CPU cores, based on cores of the earlier Banias / Dothan Pentium M microarchitecture. Yonah CPU cores were used within Intel's Core Solo and Core Duo mobile microprocessor products. SIMD performance on Yonah improved through the addition of SSE3 instructions and improvements to SSE and SSE2 implementations; integer performance decreased slightly due to higher latency cache. Additionally, Yonah included support for the NX bit.
Pentium is a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel from 1993 to 2023. The original Pentium was Intel's fifth generation processor, succeeding the i486; Pentium was Intel's flagship processor line for over a decade until the introduction of the Intel Core line in 2006. Pentium-branded processors released from 2009 onwards were considered entry-level products positioned above the low-end Atom and Celeron series, but below the faster Core lineup and workstation/server Xeon series.
The Pentium Dual-Core brand was used for mainstream x86-architecture microprocessors from Intel from 2006 to 2009, when it was renamed to Pentium. The processors are based on either the 32-bit Yonah or 64-bit Merom-2M, Allendale, and Wolfdale-3M core, targeted at mobile or desktop computers.
AMD Turion is the brand name AMD applies to its x86-64 low-power consumption mobile processors codenamed K8L. The Turion 64 and Turion 64 X2/Ultra processors compete with Intel's mobile processors, initially the Pentium M and the Intel Core and Intel Core 2 processors.
Conroe is the code name for many Intel processors sold as Core 2 Duo, Xeon, Pentium Dual-Core and Celeron. It was the first desktop processor to be based on the Core microarchitecture, replacing the NetBurst microarchitecture based Cedar Mill processor. It has product code 80557, which is shared with Allendale and Conroe-L that are very similar but have a smaller L2 cache. Conroe-L has only one processor core and a new CPUID model. The mobile version of Conroe is Merom, the dual-socket server version is Woodcrest, the quad-core desktop version is Kentsfield and the quad-core dual-socket version is Clovertown. Conroe was replaced by the 45 nm Wolfdale processor.
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