The Tech Report - Intel's Pentium 4 processor

THE PENTIUM 4 IS THE FIRST truly new processor design from Intel since the Pentium Pro debuted at under 200MHz. Believe it or not, the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Xeon, and Celeron processors were all based on the same P6 microarchitecture. Intel added some goodies like MMX, SSE, and integrated cache over the years, and they changed the way the processors were made, but they were all the same basic design.

The P4 is based on Intel's radical new NetBurst microarchitecture, and it's a different animal altogether. To best understand why I'm calling the P4 design radical, we could use a car analogy.

But I hate car analogies, so let's not.