Look Through Fast Process

The Hyper-Threading technology that Intel uses in its Pentium 4 and Xeon processors makes a single processor work as two virtual processors, so the Pentium 4 in your PC appears to have two CPUs while a dual Xeon workstation has four virtual processors.

The technology works very well, providing plenty of processing power relatively cheaply, but there is a fundamental problem as the processor is working very hard and that takes a lot of power and also generates a lot of heat. This isn't a new problem and the processor manufactrers have faced it a number of times ove the years.

The usual answer is to move to a smaller manufacturing process in the chipabrication plants, which makes each of the millions of transistrs inside the CPU smaller. This has all sorts of benefits and results in smaller, cheaper processors that can operate faster while using less power.

This approach has worked well over the years, and while there are always technical hurdles to overcome, along with huge investments to be made in farication equipment, the benefits are almost inevitable. Unfortunately Intel hit a series of major poblems when it moved its Pentium 4 from the 0.13-micron Northwood core to the 0.09-micron (90nm) Prescott, which meant that it was unable to increase the core speed of the processor to the 4GHz and beyond that it had been aiming for.