NetBurst (microarchitecture) - Successor

Successor

Intel replaced NetBurst with the Core microarchitecture, released in July 2006, which is more directly derived from 1995's Pentium Pro than it is from NetBurst. August 8, 2008 marked the end of Intel NetBurst based processors. The reason for NetBurst's abandonment was the severe heat problems caused by high clock speeds. While Core- and Nehalem-based processors have higher TDPs, most processors are multi-core, so each core gives off a fraction of the maximum TDP, and the highest-clocked Core-based single-core processors give off a maximum of 27 W of heat. The fastest-clocked desktop Pentium 4 processors (single-core) had TDPs of 115 W, compared to 88 W for the fastest clocked mobile versions. Although, with the introduction of new steppings, TDPs for some models were eventually lowered.

Presler, a Pentium D core released in early 2006, is widely touted by analysts to be the last in the line of NetBurst, although the actual final NetBurst processor released was the Celeron D 365, which was released in 2007 and clocked at 3.6 GHz. The Conroe core of the first Intel Core 2 Duo processor, using the Core microarchitecture, is the successor to Presler.

The Nehalem microarchitecture, the successor to the Core microarchitecture, was actually supposed to be an evolution of NetBurst according to Intel roadmaps dating back to 2000. But due to NetBurst's abandonment, Nehalem is now a completely different project, but has some similarities with NetBurst. Nehalem reimplements the Hyper-threading Technology first introduced in the 3.06 GHz Northwood core of Pentium 4. Nehalem also implements an L3 cache in processors based on it. For a consumer processor implementation, an L3 cache was first used in the Gallatin core of Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, but was oddly missing from Prescott 2M core of the same brand.