Well it's the time of year again for Intel® to drastically upgrade their processors. I'm convinced they only do this to make you feel like the PC you spent 2k on last year isn't worth its weight in paper clips or refrigerator magnets. After all the hype over their Pentium III® it only seems logical that they would come out with a new technological behemoth to make all those cyber enthusiasts drool on their keyboards. The release for the P4 was originally set for the end of October, but, due to some production problems, a new date has been tentatively set for the end of November.

On June 27, 2000, Intel announced their latest creation targeted specifically for Internet users who are taking advantage of new multimedia approaches to web site design, like the extensive 3D graphics, animation, streaming video, and recently introduced speech recognition technologies. The new P4 is said to be a perfect choice for the user who needs to be able to multitask between many different environments quickly and efficiently.

What makes the P4 so special, besides its large price tag, is the chips new micro- architecture called "NetBurst," which will allow the transfer of data up to three times as fast as the Pentium III. What else does the NetBurst offer? How about a 400 MHz system bus that delivers three times the bandwidth of the P3's system bus. This provides a 3.2 gigabyte transfer speed between the P4 processor and the memory controller and is the highest bandwidth desktop system bus available. Also a new Rapid Execution Engine, which is a new form of Arithmetic and Logic algorithms, does its number crunching at two times the speed of anything else on the market. Add all of this up and you get a processor capable of running applications at much higher execution rates and performance levels.

For those users that do not run processor intensive applications such as 3D games or any graphic rendering applications, it may not be the best choice in terms of how bad a bite is taken out of your wallet. The price tag of a system built with the P4 will run about $2,000 to $2,500 for just a basic system. Why is it so expensive? The presence of RDRAM memory is the culprit; Rambus who makes RDRAM, was chosen by Intel because they believed that this type of RAM gave the new platform the best performance ratio. As production and sales increase it is speculated that the price of RDRAM will drop as Intel negotiates with Rambus for better prices.

If you use your PC primarily for word processing or just to surf the net then the P4 provides no better performance than the P3. The new architecture for the chip design was made to cover a gap in the market, a need for systems that can run high-end programs that require large amounts of memory or processing power. This means that all you P3 owners out there don’t have to run out right away and buy a new processor; however, if you are a graphic designer or just a hardcore computer gamer, then this newest addition to the Intel family may be worth looking into.