Emulators.com: Pentium 4: In Depth | Linux Today

Emulators.com: Pentium 4: In Depth

Written By
Web Webster
Web Webster
Jan 1, 2001

[ Thanks to Dennis Powell for this
link. ]

“According to Gateway’s web site, the Pentium 4 is “the most
powerful processor available for your PC”. Unfortunately for most
computer users, it’s simply not true.”

“Despite a huge pavilion at COMDEX Las Vegas last month, Intel
is almost mute when it comes to this “most powerful processor”.
Instead, Intel has been insulting the television viewer all through
this Christmas shopping season with blue guy commercial pimping an
almost 2 year old Pentium III processor instead of its new flagship
processor. Why? Could there be… problems?…”

“As Tom’s Hardware site documented last month, the Pentium 4
lost miserably against the AMD Athlon at MPEG4 video encoding. Only
after Intel engineers personally modified the code did the Pentium
4 suddenly win the benchmarks. A side effect of this is that the
benchmarks on the Athlon improved considerably as well, indicating
that the code was very poorly written in the first place.”

“However, this brings up the point again that Intel now expects
software developers to completely rewrite their code in order to
see performance gains on the Pentium 4. And we don’t all have the
luxury of having an Intel engineer showing up on our doorstep to
re-write our code for us. With thousands of Windows applications
out there, not to mention the growing number of Linux applications
out for the PC, and sadly out of date compiler tools, does Intel
seriously expect millions of computer code to be rewritten just for
the Pentium 4?”

Complete
Story

Web Webster

Web Webster

Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.

Linux Today Logo

LinuxToday is a trusted, contributor-driven news resource supporting all types of Linux users. Our thriving international community engages with us through social media and frequent content contributions aimed at solving problems ranging from personal computing to enterprise-level IT operations. LinuxToday serves as a home for a community that struggles to find comparable information elsewhere on the web.

Property of TechnologyAdvice. © 2026 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved

Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.