What Happened to the Pentium 4? Why the Pentium 4 Disappeared

Описание: The Pentium 4 reached stores in November 2000 at 1.5 GHz, designed to keep climbing in clock speed for years. It stopped at 3.8 GHz, its successor was cancelled, and Intel rebuilt its desktop line around a laptop chip.

Intel spent roughly 300 million dollars launching it, Blue Man Group commercials included. Its NetBurst design doubled the pipeline to 20 stages so the clock could rise, yet each tick did less work and every gain in speed added heat. By 2004 the fastest versions were rated at 115 watts, more than twice the first chip, and American buyers were moving to laptops.

In this documentary:
2000 - why a deeper pipeline traded work per tick for gigahertz
2001 - the Rambus memory bet and the price war with AMD
2004 - Prescott, the cancelled Tejas, and the 4 GHz chip that never shipped
2005 - laptops outsell desktops, and Intel adopts performance per watt
2006 - the Core 2 Duo, built on the Pentium M design from Haifa

What remains is the processor number on the box, which replaced the gigahertz figure, and a Pentium name retired in 2023. If a Pentium 4 tower once sat under your desk, tell us what speed was printed on its sticker.

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