Eurogamer heeft een artikel geschreven over Intel's nieuwe Pentium 4. Op de ECTS die pasgeleden in Londen zijn gehouden waren een aantal pc's gepowered met die nieuwe Intel proce or, zoals Sacrifice en de nieuwe midtown madne . Helaas was er weinig aandacht voor de Pentium 4 vanwege de vele nieuwe games de draaide op een Pentium 3 systeem. Het artikel is hier te lezen.So what makes the Pentium 4 the greatest thing since sliced bread? Well Intel have realised that memory bandwidth is a key factor in system performance, and that while the move from the 66MHz to 100MHz system bus did provide a much needed boost to system performance, something more was needed. As a result Intel have not just doubled the bus speed, but have applied a 'quad pumped' bus to the Pentium 4. This quad pumped bus is effectively four 100MHz buses running in parallel, to create an effective 400MHz system bus. As a result the 800Mb/sec transfer rate of the current 100MHz front side bus (fsb) is now quadrupled to a maximum of 3.2Gb/sec.

This is a truly incredible figure, and one which is not likely to be beaten within the next 12 months. Unfortunately memory technology isn't quite up to this standard yet, or at least not at the consumer level.

Intel are quite happily touting RAMBUS as the best memory technology available, but due to the high market price it isn't becoming the high volume memory technology that they had hoped. As a result Intel are being forced to ensure compatibility with older SDRAM

technologies. Despite this problem Intel may yet be saved. DDR SDRAM (as seen on newer graphics cards such as the GeForce 2 GTS) will very soon be a mainstream technology for the desktop PC. With DDR SDRAM comes the benefits of doubling the bandwidth with the minimum

of problems. Thanks to this the old 800MB/sec can instantly become 1.6GB/Sec. With Intel's dual memory channel support (the ability to run two memory buses synchronously, and therefore double bandwidth), this 1.6Gb/Sec can easily become the 3.2Gb/sec that the P4

can utilise...Nu kijken wat AMD binnekort meekomt. De k8 ofzo? We zullen het zien en de toekomst zal ons leren.