A Sneak Peak at Intel's 65 nm Pentium 4

History draws a somewhat ambivalent image of Intel's top selling microprocessor, the Pentium 4, because of its nearly picture-perfect career that lasted until an unprecedented turning point. Intel platforms are versatile, processors are fast and fully featured today; but they run hotter and consume more energy than comparable products offered by the competition.

It all began with a radically new 180 nm processor design in 2000, which was created for the main purpose of outperforming the Athlon competition by pure clock speed alone. Less than a year later, the chip was shrunk to 130 nm and a new platform based on socket 478 was introduced. Quickly, clock speeds had rushed from 2 to 3 GHz, giving Intel the lead it sought.