Love it or hate it, the Intel Pentium processor has been the most dominant processor of the last decade. I am more of an AMD man, but I can respect what Intel has done during this time period so I have no hatred towards them.

In any case if you like computer engineering and that kind of stuff you will most definitely enjoy this mini-series done by the boys at ArsTechnica.

Perhaps the most common gripe about the Pentium 4’s microarchitecture, called Netburst by Intel, was that its staggeringly-long pipeline was a gimmick - a poor design choice made for reasons of marketing and not performance and scalability. Intel knew that the public naively equated higher MHz numbers with higher performance, or so the argument went, so they designed the P4 to run at stratospheric clock speeds and in the process made design tradeoffs that would prove detrimental to real-world performance.

Part I

Part II