| August 24, 2009 12:00 AM PDT | |
This guide discusses the Intel® Pentium® 4 processor with Hyper-Threading Technology (code named Prescott).
Prescott is the code name for a new generation of IA32 processors. The technology incorporates an enhanced Intel® NetBurst® microarchitecture. Other features include:
- Support for Hyper-Threading (HT) Technology
- Prescott New Instructions (PNI)
- Deeper pipelining to enable higher frequency
- A High-speed System Bus
Prescott improves on the Pentium® 4 processor's hyper-pipelined technology to achieve even higher clock rates than previous generations of Pentium 4 processors. At the same time, the new processor has larger first-level and second-level caches, more store buffers, write-combining buffers.
Support for PNI does not require new OS support for saving and restoring the new state during a context switch, beyond that provided for Streaming SIMD Extensions. The instruction set is compatible with all software written for Intel® architecture microprocessors.
After you read the PDF, here are additional articles and Web sites that are of interest:
- Motion Estimation Algorithms Using Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
- Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor Developer Center
- Digital Home and Media
For more complete information about compiler optimizations, see our Optimization Notice.
