New Pentium 4s Offer Raw Speed Boost
WinInfo | at | by Mike
Intel releases speed-bumped microprocessors on a fairly regular basis, but this week's introduction of new Pentium 4 processors represents a more significant performance gain than usual. Sure, the clock speeds are faster--the new chips run at 2.53, 2.26 and 2.4 GHz--but the big gains with this release are a new 533 MHz system bus and support for 1066 MHz Rambus RDRAM memory. These advances edge Intel's offerings beyond rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and distance the PC world dramatically from the Macintosh's aging Power PC designs, which are mired with top CPU speeds of 1 GHz, and lowly 133 Mhz system bus and memory speeds.