We all know a good amount of what will be included in the Pentium 4 architecture. Intel has made a great amount of information available about this. However, one thing we do not have is any reliable performance numbers. So, I wanted to get some hard core speculation regarding the Pentium 4. This thread has really died down this past week, so I wanted to recessitate it a little. Come on and help me out.

What I'm looking for are people's opinions on what aspects of the Pentium 4 will likely be fairly positive or what will be fairly negative. What do you think has been overrated to the point of marketing hype, and what do you think needs to be discussed more? Do you think the Pentium 4 will surprise everybody, or dissapoint. I welcome opinions, but would like it more if you could keep this technical, so we can respond to ideas.

Here are some aspects that could warrent discussion:

- 400MHz Front Side Bus
- Double Pumped Execution Units
- Lack of Dual Processing at Launch
- More than Double the Heat of Pentium III
- Rambus Memory
- High Bandwidth Caches
- 20-stage Pipeline / Branch Misprediction
- High Clock Frequencies
- Higher Clock Frequencies in the Future
- Excellent Branch Predictor
- Small L1 Cache
- Trace Cache
- Large # of Instructions in Flight
- New PC Specification / Large Heat Sinks
- Low Expectations (on Websites)
- Rumors on the Web
- i850 Delays
- Price Issues
- Much More!

Wow... this is a lot to talk about. Hopefully, we get some good discussions going.