Interesting Pentium 4 Facts ....

[boyfarrell]

I don't know if Apple will go for a P4 but anyway this in interesting in it's own right.

The first new feature seen by code or data as it enters Pentium 4 is the new system bus. The well-known 'FSB' of Pentium 3 is clocked at 133 MHz and able to transfer 64 bit of data per clock, offering a data bandwidth of 8 byte * 133 million/s = 1,066 MB/s. Pentium 4's system bus is only clocked at 100 MHz and also 64 bit wide, but it is 'quad-pumped', using the same principle as AGP4x. Thus it can transfer 8 byte * 100 million/s * 4 = 3,200 MB/s. This is obviously a tremendous improvement that even leaves AMD's recently 'upgraded' EV6-bus quite far behind. The bus of the most recent Athlon's is clocked at 133 MHz, 64 bit wide and 'double-pumped', offering 8 byte * 133 million/s * 2 = 2,133 MB/s.

This comes from this review of the Pentium 4.

After all the slagging off of the PowerPC FSB P4 is technically slower! They just use some fancy technology to pump more data in - clever.

Also this from Wikipedia :

he Pentium 4 performs much less work per cycle than other CPUs (such as the various Athlon or older Pentium III architectures) but the original design objective - to sacrifice instructions per clock cycle in order to achieve a greater number of cycles per second (i.e. greater frequency or clockspeed) - has been fulfilled until the platform ran into unsolvable thermal problems before reaching 4GHz, far short of the original scalability claim of 10GHz. As of mid-2005, Intel has abandoned further work on Pentium 4 to focus on cooler running Pentium M derived solutions for the desktop PC and small server market. This essentially means Intel has returned to the Pentium III CPU core and only the system bus of the Pentium 4 will live on.

And live on in Macs .....

 

[kainjow]

I don't think Apple will use a P4. If they're using that in the dev machines (simple and basic) then that should mean they most likely won't use it in their final machines. It's too hot, their other processors are much better.

 

[nixgeek]

It will most likely be a Pentium M on the low end and some other Pentium core derivative. The Pentium D shows a lot of promise especially given its price compared to the Athlon 64s. But of course, by the time most of the high-end Mac line moves over, it will be some other type of P4-based CPU, or something altogether different. We won't know until it's actually here.