articles
November 20, 2000
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THE P4 SPECS
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by Barbara Fletcher
The long-awaited Intel Pentium 4 chip was released on Monday, November 20. But is it for everyone?
Well, not everyone. If you are an Internet power user who spends long hours with graphics and multimedia, you're going to love the speed of P4. On the other hand, if you're an office applications user, you're not going to notice much difference.
Online reviews agree that the new chip smokes when it comes to the overall Internet experience: 144 new instructions have been designed in attempts to improve Internet video, multimedia, image quaility, and 3D-rendering.
But, if you're an office applications-driven individual -- plugging away at spreadsheets and word processing -- you might just want to stick with Pentium IIIs for a while. Experts seem to agree that people who use their PCs mainly for office applications won't notice much of a difference in processing speeds with the new chip.
According to a CNET interview in October with Paul Otellini, General Manager of the Intel Architecture Group, when compared to the fastest 1-GHz Pentium III, the Pentium 4 offers 25 percent faster MP3 encoding, 50 percent faster video encoding, 33 percent faster graphics rendering, and 44 percent faster games.
With speeds like that, plus real-time video editing, professional 3D imaging, and enhanced ability to create rich media content, the new P4 technology could almost tempt a Mac-religious graphics artist or video editor.
The new chip rockets into the market at 1.4 GHz and 1.5 GHz -- faster than any Athlon. It boasts a 400MHz front-side bus -- about three times faster than the previous 133MHz bus currently supported by Intel PIII processors. And Intel claims that when in operation the chip uses an average of 50 watts of power.
One of the downsides, however, involves memory: although other types will be supported in the future, the Pentium 4 currently supports only the Rambus RDRAM technology. And it's expensive.
If you are looking to buy a P4 desktop system, Dell's Dimension 8100 series are going for $2000 - $3100 USD and they are shipping to Canada. Gateway is selling P4 1.5 MHz systems starting at $3500 USD, but it's not clear whether or not they ship to Canada yet. Canada's electronic superstores FutureShop and CampuSmart make no mention of P4 on either of their web sites.
So it looks like Santa won't be hauling many Pentium 4 systems on his sleigh this Christmas. As with all good things, we'll just have to wait.
Related reading:
Intel Pentium 4 Processor Press Release -- Intel
Behold the New Pentium 4 -- Wired News
Pentium 4 computers hit the market -- CNET
Pentium 4 Announced, AMD stays the course -- CanadaCompute
Pentium 4 Bested By Pentium III In Business Apps -- TechWeb