AMD

It seems that Intel had very ambitious plans for the Pentium 4, unlike what we see in today's P4 chips. In the original blueprints for the P4 chip were a third-level cache strapped to the die, 2 full-fledged floating-point units, a bigger execution trace cache and a L1 cache.

Unfortunately, Intel engineers had to redesign the chip and strip down most features when the chip size had gotten too big.

What other plans did Intel originally have for the Pentium 4?
Check it out here.

According to this article on LinuxGram, the majority of Linux
distributions won't install on the Pentium 4. Apparently this is caused by the
CPUID database, which contains no information on the Pentium IV. Currently only Red Hat and
Turbolinux have updated versions of the CPUID databases.

According to an Anandtech article, word has it that Intel says they'll be breaking 10GHz speeds a whole lot sooner than you expect - quite likely by 2005. I'm not sure about you, but I know this time last year I wasn't predicting we'd be seeing 1.5GHz. How wrong I was about that... 10Ghz does seem like quite a bit when you think about it, but I have a feeling that we're going to be seeing this speed, a whole lot sooner than 2005. Eitherways, here's the hook up on that Anadtech piece.

Saw this over at Arstechnica

Thanksgiving holiday, their European colleagues were busy working on a tweak for FlasK MPEG that sheds a very different light on Pentium 4's video-encoding performance. Now, u may see the new performance of P4, which is over perform p3 and athlon. Check out the real deal here

INDEPENDENT benchmarking numbers performed on Intel's new Pentium 4 processor indicate less-than-revolutionary performance, and an improved version is already set to arrive next year...

...A 1GHz Pentium III processor outperformed a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 clocked back to 1GHz in six out of eight performance benchmarks, according to Tom's Hardware Guide. The results were similar when comparing an AMD Athlon processor against the Pentium 4 with both chips operating at 1.2GHz...

In the Intel Desktop CPU & Chipset Roadmap, AnandTech details the Intel roadmap before the Pentium 4 hits the streets next week. The article includes the desktop CPU and chipset strategy. They discuss and answer the questions. Does the Pentium 4 have a chance or is it doomed from the start? What will become of the Pentium III? And will Intel ever speed up the Celeron's FSB? and more including analysis of Intel's current 2000/2001 roadmap.

Intel's hopeful Athlon-killer will not support SMP until the middle of '01. Now, a number of you are upset about this, but let's consider just how wise of a decision this is for Intel. Where is Intel's sales hurting right now? Is it in the SMP market? Uh, well, no, they dominate it in the x86 world for obvious reasons.

With the Pentium 4 in mail order stores now (before Intel's release date), Sharky Extreme felt it was time to give an update on the status of Intel's next generation chip as well as a look at some more information on Intel's upcoming SDR and DDR chipsets (Brookdale) for the Pentium 4.

Saw this over at HNN

A provocative documentation and source code proposol by members of the PaX project may spell the end for buffer overflow attacks on Intel IA-32 chips. The possibility of creating non-executable pages in x86 chips is at the helm of this massive undertaking. No one can be certain this scheme will work without extreme peer review of both the paper and source code.


PaX announcement on SecurityGeeks