It"s time once again for the drip-drip-drip progression foretold by Moore"s law to release another drop. After a breathtaking flurry of new chipset releases, including the 875P and 865 family, and after backfilling its processor line to include Hyper-Threading and 800MHz bus support across all its speed grades, Intel is ready to move its Pentium 4"s top clock speed up a notch, to 3.2GHz. Perhaps you"re thinking it"s a little too soon for yet another Pentium 4 upgrade, but in truth, Intel hasn"t ratcheted up the P4"s top clock speed since last November, when the Pentium 4 3.06GHz debuted as the first P4 with Hyper-Threading support.
Since then, as in Dick Gephardt"s campaign headquarters, all the activity has been elsewhere. Intel has upgraded its lineup of Pentium 4 processors and chipsets with an 800MHz bus, dual-channel DDR400 memory, ubiquitous Hyper-Threading, AGP 8X, and Serial ATA—to name just some of the improvements. The Pentium 4 platform practically pulses with bandwidth everywhere, and performance is up as a result.
We found the Pentium 4 3.0GHz chip to be a little bit faster overall than AMD"s latest, the Athlon XP 3200+, in our last round of tests. Still, with a new 400MHz front-side bus and its own dual-DDR400 chipset in the nForce2 Ultra 400, the Athlon XP 3200+ is no slouch. The Athlon turned in the highest scores in many tests, and put up a heck of a fight for the overall crown.