Difference Between Pentium 3 and Pentium 4

Pentium 3 vs Pentium 4

The Pentium 3 and 4 are two of the outdated lines of processors from Intel . These are no longer in production as Intel has moved on the Core and Core 2 processors. As you might have guessed by the numbering, the Pentium 4 line superseded the Pentium 3 as processor manufacturers competed for very high clock speeds. The Pentium 3 is based on the P6 microarchitecture while the Pentium 4 was based on the totally new Netburst microarchitecture.

Since the Pentium 4 is a newer line of processors compared to the Pentium 3, there were major changes to the features of the processor. First, they no longer share the same socket type, so you could not plug a Pentium 4 processor into a Pentium 3 socket and vice versa. While the clock speeds of Pentium 3 processors ended at 1.4Ghz, Pentium 4 processors started out just a bit lower than that at 1.3Ghz and rising to as high as 3.8Ghz for the latest ones in the line.

When it comes to new features, the very first Intel processor for desktops that had 64-bit processing capabilities was a Pentium 4. All Pentium 3 processors lack this capability and only had 32-bit instruction sets. Pentium 4 also saw the introduction of SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) 2 and 3 while the Pentium 3 only had the original SSE instruction set.

Although the design of the Pentium 4 allowed for faster processing and much higher clock speeds, thermal problems rapidly plagued the Netburst architecture. The wasted energy as well as the cooling needed to dissipate the heat meant that it is ill-fitted for mobile computing. Even when Intel started to move towards multi-core processors, the heat issues of the Pentium 4 was still proving to be a significant obstacle. Because of that, Intel decided to base their latest Core processors on the Pentium M which was in turn based on the Pentium 3.

Summary:

1. Pentium 4 superseded Pentium 3
2. Pentium 4 was based on the Netburst microarchitecture while the Pentium 3 was based on the P6
3. Pentium 4 did not share the same socket type as Pentium 3
4. Pentium 4 has a much higher clock speed than Pentium 3
5. Some Pentium 4s were 64-bit capable while all Pentium 3s are not
6. Pentium 4 has SSE2 and SSE3 while the Pentium 3 does not

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