What is the difference between pentium 4 and i7 processor

farrengottu

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if you want to know everything thats different. read these two pages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_bridge

if you just want to know performance. look at the charts here on tomshardware. it will take looking at a few charts to get an idea of how the pentium 4 compares to one of the i7s, as they are not directly compared.

if you want a core comparison you can look here.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/x86-core-performance-comparison/benchmarks,128.html
 

Max1s

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The pentium 4 is an OLD single core chip. Alot of versions were made, on sockets 423, 478, and 775.
Some run at high clock speeds above 3 ghz, but all have long pipelines, meaning the number of clock cycles it takes to actually do something is higher. So you dont have very good single-task power.
Some have hyper-threading technology, which means for every physical core it has one virtual core. So its a virtual dual-core. But thats still not gonna give you much multi-tasking power.

The i7 is a very modern physical quad core chip with hyper-threading, high clock speeds, turbo-mode (even higher clock speeds up to 3.7ghz), and very efficient architecture. It is a single and multi-tasking beast. However for most people the i5 will be enough, as the i5 is basically an i7 minus hyper-threading and most programs cant use 8 cores anyway. (i7 has four physical and four virtual cores)


That enough?
 


While the i7 is a "modern" quad core, its still based on Core tech which was based on the older Pentium III Coppermine CPU.

But the main difference is a lot like you said. The Pentium 4 (NetBurst) focused on higher clock speeds so it had longer pipelines and topped out at 3.8GHz.

The i7 (Sandy Bridge) focuses on IPC (Instructions Per Clock) which will allow for it to run at lower speeds yet still maintain the same if not better performance.



Unless you have a Focus RS8:

http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/coupes/112_0408_mismatch_comparison/viewall.html

5.0 V8 Focus vs Lambo. Craziness.
 


Thats a better comparison. The Focus isn't a bad car. Nor is my Fusion.

But Pentium 4 vs even a Pentium G620 is like watching Lance Armstrong race Dale Earnhardt Jr each using ther respective modes of transportation.
 

amdfangirl

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Never heard of them. I would search but 64kb/s internet and about 800MiB of Firefox tabs stop me. (For school research lol).
 


Strange as they are a Aussie band. Still might not be your music.

I still don't envy your ISPs. Even ours are starting to give bandwidth caps but I haven't hit them.

Although since my new mobo/CPU/RAM setup I would have had to download 200GB+ of games again..... Glad I backed it all up and Steam is awesome.
 

amdfangirl

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I hit mine by accident whilst trying to make a Linux spin.

Kept downloading without pause.

Ended up downloading 15GiB where the ISO was supposed to be >1GiB.

Didn't even make the silly ISO.

But yes, I hate to say it, I do listen more often to British bands, and even then these days I prefer to stream Jazz music from ABC Jazz (which is unmetered for me, yay!).