The 2 Tech Giants, Intel and AMD are in for a fight today again with the release of Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGhz and 2.2Ghz processor based on 0.13 micron Northwood core vs the AMD Athlon XP 2000+ running at 1.67Ghz. As we can see, the megahertz race between Intel and AMD is drawing further and further apart with Intel taking the lead with some half a Ghz ahead. Of course, this is just pure clock speed based performance with no architecture capabilities in play but no one can defy clock speed is a very important performance indicator just like the IPC (Instructions Per Clock). It is not easy to attain the best of both worlds so Intel's strategy is to ramp up its Pentium 4 clock speed but suffer in IPC and make use of its architecture such as Instruction Trace Cache, Rapid Execution Engine and the SSE2 Instruction Engine to further improve the performance. However, for the whole of last year, Intel is still unable to unseat AMD Athlon processors with their Pentium 4s at least for the DIY market although things start brighten up towards second half last year when Intel start slashing prices of their Pentium 4 and availability of cheaper memory alternatives with SDRAM and DDR SDRAM to pair up with their Pentium 4.
FULL STORY @ VR-ZONE (http://www.vr-zone.com/reviews/Intel/P4-Northwood/)
