So there is probably a lot of information about the Pentium 4 that you really don't care about. I'm gonna try and wade through all of it, to bring you specific statistics, and technologies (with brief explanations) that make the Pentium 4 what it is. I'm gonna finish up with some basics about why this chip will rock for us gamers.

   First of all - the important stats:

   Now, the explanation. For those of you who'd prefer a very deep technical explanation, you'll need to check out Intel's page (where I actually got all of this info). For those of you - like me, who really only need the low-down, here we go.

   400 MHz Internal Bus Speed. There's really not that much to explain here. To give you and idea of what's going on, I'll speak about this in comparison with the 'older' Pentium 3's. The older chips had internal bus speeds of either 100 or 133. They would then have a clock multiplier of 5 or 7.5 or 10 - whatever they needed to get to the rated speed of the chip. If you had a P3 800MHZ then it had an internal bus speed of 100MHz, and a clock multiplier of 8 ( 8 * 100 = 800.... ). With this newer P4, and it's internal bus speed of 400MHz, you can see how fast chips will become. Imagine a 400MHz bus with a clock multiplier of 10.... if you did your math right it'd be 4000MHz - or a 4 GHz processor. Yeah... WOW! But don't get your hopes up too high, I've read that they can only take the existing architecture up to 3GHz. Only up to... as if that weren't enough! In any case, the internal bus speed of the P4's will allow for a much higher scale processor.

   ALU. This stands for Arithmetic Logic Unit. This is the part of the processor that will calculate all of the math involving integers (whole math). The point here is to be able to have a place to throw the 'simple' math, and get it back quickly. As I mentioned before, it runs at 800MHz - quick enough for ya?

   Execution Trace Cache. This little puppy will help your processor communicate with it's self. Part of the processor works on one project, but has to 'pass' the results on to the next step. This new execution trace cache will hold the data that has already been worked on, until it needs to be used in the next step. You could think of this part as something akin to a bank. Part of your life is spent making money. The bank will hold the money that you've made, until the other part of you is ready to spend it. (Unless you're like me and the bank holds no money 'cause it's spent as fast as you get it!). The reason that this is so cool for processors is that traditionally the individual parts have had problems with 'traffic jams'. Information was ready to be passed on, but the part that was supposed to get it wasn't ready.

   SSE2 Instructions. This stands for Streaming SIMD Extensions 2. SIMD was a technology that came along after MMX. We all know that MMX helped with the graphics. So did SIMD... and now SSE2 will. Notice though, the first word and last word. Streaming and extensions. Streaming refers to the gamers all time favorite: streaming media - graphics, sound, etc. Extensions refers to the fact that this new 'technology' is an extension to the SIMD technology previously released. Let me explain a bit here. The chip needs to know what to do with certain 'projects' that it's given by the user. It has 'instructions' that tell it what to do. MMX was a set of instructions, so was SIMD, and now SSE2 is. Again, SSE2 uses SIMD but adds in special instructions for dealing with multimedia applications.

   Advanced Dynamic Execution. Before I can really explain this function I need to mention another function of these processors. It's called 'branch prediction'. This is a method that attempts to predict what will need to be fed to the processor next. Yeah there are brains inside the brains of your computer! Well it gets better. You can think of ADE as the brains inside the brains inside the brains of your computer. Let's go over that again. The processor calculates. Branch prediction attempts to help, by guessing what the processor needs next. ADE attempts to help even further by keeping track of what worked in the branch prediction and what didn't work. In the end ADE helps reduce branch mis-prediction by about 33%. Think I'm B.S.'n' you? Go read the above mentioned article from Intel that speaks in more technical terms what I just went over (you'll want to scroll down to the part titled Advanced Dynamic Execution on page 4)

   Advanced Transfer Cache. This one is easy - not like the last one! It simple is a statement about the fact that the P4 can 'get and send' information inside its self faster. For instance, the P3 exchanged information with the L2 cache at 16GB/s, whereas the P4 does it at 44.8GB/s. See the improvement? Yeah - faster is better! : ) This also means that your processor will spend less time just sitting there waiting for information, and more time actually working with the information.

   Rapid Execution Engine. This is actually similar enough to the ALU that I'm not going to go into it. All it is referring to is the fact that the 'simple' stuff will go at twice the speed (800MHz) of the normal internal clock (400MHz), so you won't have to be waiting for any for the 'extras' to get done.

   Hyper-Pipelined Technology. This is in reference to the fact that the main 'guts' of the P4 chip have doubled. The P3 had a 10 stage pipeline for processing, and the P4 has a 20 stage pipeline. This will be a clear indication as well as the internal bus speed, of the amount that the P4 will be able to handle in the years to come. Having more 'piping' will allow it to handle more traffic (think of the sewers - I'm not going to expand on that!).

   The bottom line for all of this is that the P4 was designed with Intel's crystal ball vision of the future in mind. Intel sees a computing world that will rely heavily on multimedia in the next few years. I personally agree. The P4 has tested lower than the P3 on certain applications. These applications would be the type where the advanced SSE2, and ADE have little to no hope of doing good. For instance.. how can the processor 'guess' what I'm going to need next as I type? But it can definitely guess that when you fire a rocket, and you've only drawn the first frame of it's trajectory, it still has to draw the rest. 

   In any case, the P4 will be very good for the future of computing/gaming. It will be a lot like the P3 though. Programmers had to write the code in to their games to take advantage of the new technologies that became available with the P3 - the same holds true for the P4. Right now I think the only game that was written with the P4 in mind was Sacrifice... So go get your P4 and wait for that next awesome game to use these screamin' features. Me?... not enough money!