Gecko's CPU Library

Intel Pentium 4 (Cedar Mill) processors

Introduction: January 2006

Overview

The Pentium 4 brand refered to Intel's line of single-core mainstream desktop and laptop central processing units (CPUs) introduced on November 20, 2000 (August 8, 2008 was the date of last shipments of Pentium 4s). They had the 7th-generation architecture, called NetBurst, which was the company's first all-new design since 1995, when the Intel P6 architecture of the Pentium Pro CPUs had been introduced. NetBurst differed from the preceding Intel P6 - of Pentium III, II, etc. - by featuring a very deep instruction pipeline to achieve very high clock speeds (up to 4GHz) limited only by max. power consumption (TDP) reaching up to 115W in 3.6–3.8GHz Prescotts and Prescotts 2M (a high TDP required an additional cooling that was noisy or expensive). In 2004, the initial 32-bit x86 instruction set of the Pentium 4 microprocessors was extended by the 64-bit x86-64 set.

Pentium 4 CPUs introduced the SSE2 and SSE3 instruction sets to accelerate calculations, transactions, media processing, 3D graphics, and games. They also integrated Hyper-threading (HT), a feature to make one physical CPU work as two logical and virtual CPUs. The Intel's flagship Pentium 4 also came in a low-end version branded Celeron (often referred to as Celeron 4), and a high-end derivative, Xeon, intended for multiprocessor servers and workstations.

The Pentium 4 had an IHS (Integrated Heat Spreader) that prevented the CPU core from accidentally getting damaged when mounting and unmounting cooling solutions. Prior to the IHS, a CPU shim was sometimes used by people worried about damaging the core. Overclockers sometimes removed the IHS on Socket 478 chips to allow for more direct heat transfer. However, on LGA775 chips the IHS was directly welded to the processor core, meaning that the IHS cannot be removed without irreparably damaging the processor.

In 2005, the Pentium 4 was superseded by the Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition dual-core CPUs.

The Cedar Mill core

The final revision of the Pentium 4 was Cedar Mill, released in early 2006. This was simply a straight shrink of the 600-series core to 65 nm, with no real feature additions. Cedar Mill had a lower heat output than Prescott, with a TDP of 86W. The Core Stepping of D0 in late 2006 reduced this to 65 watts. It has a 65 nm core and features a 31-stage pipeline (just like Prescott), 800MT/s FSB, Intel 64, Hyper-Threading and Virtualization Technology. As with Prescott-2M, Cedar Mill also has 2MB of L2 cache. It was released as Pentium 6x1 and 6x3 (product code 80552) at frequencies from 3.0GHz up to 3.6GHz. Overclockers managed to exceed 8GHz with these processors. None of the 6x1 range (631, 641, 651, and 661) had Virtualization Technology support. As of March 2007 it had not been possible to obtain 6x3 nor had Intel any records of this product line on their homepage.

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.