The speed at which the semiconductor industry moves is truly breathtaking. A little over one year ago, we were heralding AMD's breach of the 1GHz barrier - a momentous occasion that had the Sharky Extreme staff reaching for leftover Y2K-bash party favors. Although gigahertz (and millennium) madness has long since subsided, Intel is more than two-thirds of the way to notching the gigahertz belt once again. With the release of their 1.7GHz Pentium 4, Intel has taken a full 200MHz jump over their current flagship 1.5GHz with the hope of usurping the performance lead held by AMD's latest release.

When the Pentium 4 launched back in November of last year, we were impressed with the speed in which SSE2-optimized applications ran. Similarly, the bandwidth supplied by the dual channels of RDRAM was unprecedented. However, despite a hefty list of architectural changes and a raw megahertz advantage, the Pentium 4 was outpaced in most of the benchmarks that comprise our suite. An explanation of exactly why the Athlon was able to maintain the upper-hand could get technical, lengthy, and generally boring, so we'll leave it at this: most of the applications used today do not take advantage of the Pentium 4's available bandwidth. On top of that, the loss of IPC due to the pipeline lengthening has not been fully compensated for with processor frequency.

Since Intel can't expedite the release of bandwidth-intensive applications or directly force SSE2 optimizations upon developers, they are playing the one card in their hand that they know sells well: clock speed. The 1.7GHz part under scrutiny today represents an important step for the chip giant in that it will either help validate their latest architectural release as the performance leader or serve as the next step in a debilitating game of catch-up.