HP Evo D500 Comparison of Intel Pentium III and Pentium 4 Processor Performanc - Page 8

Comparison of Intel Pentium III and Pentium 4 Processor Performance White Paper 8 Summary The Pentium 4 architecture offers significant innovations compared to earlier Pentium III technology. These innovations lead to breakthroughs in performance that are measured and substantiated by testing reported in this white paper. The Pentium 4 processor is optimized for large data sets transfer and handling, so customers will see significantly improved performance over previous generation Pentium III processors in applications that handle and require large amounts of data. Floating-point-based multimedia applications tend to have branches that are very predictable and thus have a higher IPC (Instructions executed Per Clock) potential. Integer-based and basic office productivity applications tend to have more random branches in application code, thus are more difficult to predict. This means the IPC potential is not high, but the fact that Pentium 4 is available in higher frequencies than Pentium III results in increased performance with these applications. It is important for the user to note the fact that higher processor speeds from Intel will only be available in the future from the Pentium 4. The Pentium III will offer no further increases in processor speeds. (Intel will continue to refresh Celeron processors, however). At some point, regardless of the application, improvements in performance can only be obtained by greater processor speed. The customer should be aware that Compaq expects that, in the near future, office applications will be handling a lot more data, thus resulting in the need for increased processing power and efficiency that the Pentium 4 offers.