Features of Pentium 4 Processor:

The Pentium 4 processor was developed by Intel using Intel Netburst architecture in 2000. It was commonly used in desktop and laptop central processing units (CPUs). It is the 7^th generation x 86 micro-architecture, called NetBurst. NetBurst differed from the preceding P6 family (6^th generation x 86 micro-architecture) pro­cessors by featuring a very deep instruction pipeline to achieve very high clock speeds of up to 3.8 GHz.  The Pentium 4 processor’s NetBurst architecture incorporates all the features of the previous P6 architecture of Pentium II and Pentium III and some new features are added. The new features of Pentium 4 Processor are given below:

• Pentium 4 was developed base on NetBurst micro-architecture.
• It consists of 42 million transistors.
• Clock speed of Pentium 4 varies from 1.3 GHz to 3.8 GHz.
• It operates in hyper-pipelined technology and it has a 20-stage pipeline.
• Pentium 4 has on-die 256 Kb non-blocking, 8-way set associative L2 cache. The L2 cache uses a 256-bit interface that transports data-transfer rates of 48 GB/s at 1.5 GHz.
• The instruction set of the Pentium 4 processor is compatible with x86 (i386), x 86-64, MMX, SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 instructions. These instructions include 128-bit SIMD integer arithmetic and 128-bit SIMD double-precision floating-point operations.
• It has 8 KB L1 data cache and an execution trace cache to store up to 12 K decoded micro-operations (μ-ops) in the order of program execution.
• Another features of Pentium 4 Processor is that it supports faster system bus at 400 MHz to 1066 MHz with 3.2 GB/s of bandwidth.
• The Pentium 4 processor has two arithmetic logic units (ALUs) which are operated at twice the core processor frequency.
• It is fabricated in 0.18 micron CMOS process.
• It has advanced dynamic execution.
• It has enhanced branch prediction.
• It has a rapid execution engine.
• It has enhanced floating point/multimedia applications.