Performance Rating - Pentium 4 Competition

Pentium 4 Competition

In 2000, Intel debuted its Pentium 4 microprocessor. Although the processor was inferior to its predecessor, the Pentium III, on a clock-for-clock basis, Intel designed the processor to be capable of reaching much higher clock speeds than the Pentium III. Using the fact that the raw Gigahertz (GHz) speed of the Pentium 4 was faster than AMD's Athlon XP microprocessor, Intel advertised the Pentium 4 using clock speed to distinguish between the performances of their different processor models. This marketing was effective for Intel as they had used this method for since the introduction of the Pentium, because consumers could compare quantitative clock speeds much, much more easily than comparing qualitative microprocessor features.

The continuation of this practice, despite lower performance per clock, led consumers to conclude that AMD's Athlon XP processors, because they had much slower clock speeds than Intel's Pentium 4 processors, were inferior to Intel's Pentium 4 microprocessors. In reality, on a clock-for-clock basis, the Athlon XP microprocessor was superior to the Pentium 4 on a number of benchmarks. An Athlon XP with a 2 GHz clock would easily outperform a 2 GHz Pentium 4 on most benchmarks.