The enthusiast buzz on Intel's stuff isn't so much the Pentium 4, but the Pentium-M, originally designed for laptops. Hot Hardware has DFI's mATX i855 Pentium-M on tap to show why it's becoming such a hot item fo geeks. As you can see, although this is a 478 pin Intel processor socket, the Pentium M pin-out is in fact keyed differently than a standard Pentium 4 socket 478 CPU. And the two sockets are not compatible. The internal architecture of the Dothan core Pentium M processor is held very guarded by Intel. In fact, it is not known how many stages Dothan's pipeline has but it is rumored to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 12. This explains the processor's ability to have significantly better overall throughput clock-for-clock versus the 31 stage pipeline in the Pentium 4 Prescott core. I find it quite interesting that Intel's most efficient CPU wasn't targeted at the desktop to start with. I'm sure most people are wondering "why the hell didn't Intel make this the P4 instead of the hellfire-hot Prescott?" I don't know, but I do know that the Pentium-M has some sweet potential and I hope this is the way they go before they put out their dual-core CPU's. The whole article can be had here.
