The fastest Pentium III available is designed to work with a 133MHz front side bus (FSB). With approximately 1GBps of bandwidth, this FSB acts as a bottleneck between the CPU and the rest of the system. Intel will remove this bottleneck with the Pentium 4 by using a 100MHz FSB quad-pumped to the equivalent of 400MHz. 400MHz on a 64-bit bus yields 3.2GBps of data bandwidth, three times what the Pentium III's 133MHz FSB can handle. This bandwidth will keep the CPU well connected to the i850 chipset, codenamed Tehama, which will support dual RDRAM channels.

The Pentium 4 is coming later this year. At first it will reside in high-end business systems and enthusiast consumer systems. For a while yet, the Pentium 4 and Pentium III will coexist with the Pentium III taking the mid-range. As yields improve and clock speeds rise, the Pentium 4 will start to drop into the mid-range of Intel's product line, as the Celeron, or likely its successor codenamed Timna, take on the low-end. The Pentium 4 processor and Pentium III processor will probably coexist all next year in the desktop market segment.

And the good news is, this is only a trailer. Check back for a Pentium 4 review when this "advanced rapid dynamic hyper NetBurst" product is released. At that time, we will go into far more depth about the Pentium 4 micro-architecture and we will have extensive benchmarks to see just how fast Intel's new processor is.

Jon Simon
Assistant Editor