Intel's only strength is coming up brands. but that is there only strength. the reason for the digsine of the Pentium 4 was marketing wanted the higher and higher gigahertz numbers and it did not succeed at that.
Yes, Intel has had strong branding success in the past with Intel Inside and Centrino. However, the reason P4 was built the way it was was not because of marketing. Intel had done an internal study and decided that the best way to boost performance was to reduce the load on each pipeline stage and create more stages in the pipeline. This would normally cause a drop in IPC however, Intel's computer simulations showed that this could be theoretically offset by better branch prediction. You can still read this whitepaper at Intel.
Based on this study, Intel created a prototype and this was what became Williamette. It took a bit more tweaking to get Northwood. Unfortunately, Intel then discovered that the double clocked components in Northwood overheated when they tried to push the clock. This meant that they had to replace the double clocked components with more single clocked components and this stretched the pipeline even further and led to Prescott.
Well, the simple answer is that Intel was stuck because Prescott was the only processor they had that was capable of running x86-64 instructions. The older Northwood didn't have the AMD64 extensions and neither did Pentium M. Recall that not even Yonah had AMD64 instructions. Intel is again stuck now because only the Prescott based Xeons will go 4-way or higher.
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Yes, Intel has had strong branding success in the past with Intel Inside and Centrino. However, the reason P4 was built the way it was was not because of marketing. Intel had done an internal study and decided that the best way to boost performance was to reduce the load on each pipeline stage and create more stages in the pipeline. This would normally cause a drop in IPC however, Intel's computer simulations showed that this could be theoretically offset by better branch prediction. You can still read this whitepaper at Intel.
Based on this study, Intel created a prototype and this was what became Williamette. It took a bit more tweaking to get Northwood. Unfortunately, Intel then discovered that the double clocked components in Northwood overheated when they tried to push the clock. This meant that they had to replace the double clocked components with more single clocked components and this stretched the pipeline even further and led to Prescott.
then when it was shown to be false why did they contenue
Well, the simple answer is that Intel was stuck because Prescott was the only processor they had that was capable of running x86-64 instructions. The older Northwood didn't have the AMD64 extensions and neither did Pentium M. Recall that not even Yonah had AMD64 instructions. Intel is again stuck now because only the Prescott based Xeons will go 4-way or higher.
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