Intel Press Release

Intel Announces New NetBurst® Micro-Architecture For Pentium® 4 Processor

INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM CONFERENCE, SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 22, 2000 - Intel Corporation today disclosed details of its new Intel® NetBurst® micro-architecture, the name for the technical features contained in its upcoming Intel® Pentium® 4 processor. This new processor is scheduled to be introduced later this year.

Albert Yu, senior vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, explained that the Intel® NetBurst micro-architecture is the first new desktop processor micro-architecture for Intel since the P6 micro-architecture was introduced in the Pentium® Pro processor in 1995. The Pentium 4 processor is initially targeted at the consumer enthusiasts and business power users. The new Pentium 4 processor is based on an advanced technology designed to maximize performance both today and in the future while keeping consumers on the cutting edge of the Internet.

Intel Pentium 4 Processor Design Goals
As part of the Pentium 4 design development process, Intel targeted the delivery of world class, end-user appreciable performance across both existing and emerging applications and usage models. Specific attention was focused on Internet, imaging, streaming video, speech, 3-D, multimedia and multi-tasking user environments. In addition, Intel set out to develop a next generation micro-architecture that would deliver both performance and frequency scalability well into the future.

New Intel® NetBurst Micro-Architecture Features

  • Hyper Pipelined Technology -- The Intel® Pentium® 4 processor doubles the pipeline depth to 20 stages, significantly increasing processor performance and frequency capability.
  • Rapid Execution Engine -- The processor's Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs) run at twice the core frequency, allowing it to execute certain instructions in 1/2 core clock tick. Integer instructions execute at twice the speed of the rest of the processor. This results in higher execution throughput and reduced latency of execution.
  • 400 MHz System Bus -- This advanced, split-transaction, deeply pipelined system bus delivers three times the bandwidth of the Intel® Pentium® III processor system bus. It has 128-byte lines with 64-byte accesses (32-byte lines on the previous generation). This provides a 3.2 gigabyte transfer speed between the Pentium 4 processor and the memory controller and is the highest bandwidth desktop system bus available.
  • Execution Trace Cache -- This is an advanced Level 1 instruction cache that caches decoded instructions (~12K micro-ops), thus removing the decoder latency from main execution loop. This revolutionary technology delivers a much higher performance instruction cache as well as makes more efficient use of cache memory storage. In addition, the Pentium 4 processor's Level 2 Advanced 256 KB Transfer Cache delivers a 48GB/sec interface that scales with core frequency increases.

Improved Intel® NetBurst Micro-Architecture Features

  • Advanced Dynamic Execution -- The Pentium 4 processor has an extremely efficient out-of-order speculative execution engine that keeps the execution units busy. Also new is an enhanced branch prediction capability that keeps the processor executing to the correct program flow and reduces the mis-prediction penalty associated with deeper pipelines.
  • Streaming SIMD Extension 2 (SSE2) -- SSE2 extends MMX™ and SSE technology with the addition of 144 new instructions, including 128-bit SIMD integer arithmetic and 128-bit SIMD double precision floating point instructions that delivers performance increases across a broad range of applications.

About IDF
The Intel Developer Forum Conference is Intel's premier technical forum comprising nearly 250 sessions and hands-on labs and more than 100 demonstrations of cutting-edge products and technologies. IDF attracts thousands of hardware and software developers worldwide. Now in its third year, the semi-annual conference provides hardware OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), IHVs (independent hardware vendors), and ISVs (independent software vendors) with in-depth information on Intel technologies and initiatives. More information on the Intel Developer Forum can be found at http://developer.intel.com/idf. Updated information is available between Intel Developer Forums by subscribing to the Intel Developer Update Magazine at http://developer.intel.com/update/.

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