But now the scenario is changing. The Pentium 4 is alive and kicking ahead. The news of Pentium 4 hitting the 2 Giga-hertz mark is now old. The hot news is that now the Pentium 4 family is also coming in a new mPGA 478 pin form, (from 1.5 GHz onwards) i.e. they will have 478 pins as compared to the initial 423 pins. The performance and features of these processors are the same for both packages. They are much smaller and compact in size as compared to the earlier version. The main reason for the addition of extra pins is to electrically support the forthcoming Pentium 4 processors clocking at frequencies higher than 2 GHz. They are expected to provide it with more power and ground pins, which will help it provide a more robust power plane to the device and minimize noise, with better grounding facilities, thus resulting in a more stable performance at higher speeds. The i850 (for RDRAM support) and i845 (for SDRAM support) chipsets will support both the packages.
They will also be available in the initial PGA 423-pin design, but only till 2 GHz. This will be the end of the road for it. Forthcoming Pentium 4 CPUs of higher clock speeds will all be using this new mPGA 478-pin system. So it’s recommended that, customers who are willing to buy a Pentium 4 system should strongly consider purchasing a system that supports the 478-pin package as this will facilitate future upgrades to higher, post 2 GHz processors. This is sad news for all those who've already purchased a 423-pin based Pentium 4 system and are willing to upgrade to 2+ GHz processors as there is no option left for them, but to change the entire motherboard to upgrade and move on.
When the Pentium-III was launched, with its new KNI (Katmai New Instruction) set, I remember magazines quoting that there was only 10% speed difference in a Pentium II and a Pentium III of similar clock speed and an upgrade would not be profitable. But in reality, the latter made the former history because of consistent increase in clock speeds and more and more software coming out with support for the KNI instruction set, which made the Pentium III a hit. It’s a similar situation now. The benchmarks (of the earlier Pentium 4) did indicate a better performance but not as much as expected by a processor running at such a high speed. In simpler words, the performance was not proportional to the clock speed. One important factor is that the absence of software support goes a long way in dragging the benchmarks down.
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