The Professional S2 ships with an Intel Pentium® P4 processor on board. Many music software and hardware vendors have certified Intel's Pentium 4 architecture as the best choice. When compared to other processors, the Pentium® 4 delivers massive horsepower that allows media producers to complete projects with large amounts of linear tracks and significant amounts of processing with effects plug-ins.

Detail Specifications

Intel NetBurst® Micro architecture

Intel NetBurst micro architecture delivers a number of innovative features including Hyper-Threading Technology, hyper-pipelined technology, 800 MHz system bus, and Execution Trace Cache, as well as a number of enhanced features such as Advanced Transfer Cache, Advanced Dynamic Execution, enhanced floating-point and multimedia unit, and Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2). Further enhancements in the next generation 90 nm process-based Pentium® 4 processor include Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (SSE3). Many of these innovations and advances were made possible with improvements in processor technology, process technology, and circuit design and could not previously be implemented in high-volume, manufacturable solutions. The features and resulting benefits of the micro architecture are defined below.

Hyper-Threading Technology

HHyper-Threading Technology is a new technology from Intel that enables a single processor to run two separate threads simultaneously. This bottom line is 30+% increase in performance and in media production, performance and stability are, well, everything.

Hyper-Threading Technology enables multi-threaded software applications to execute threads in parallel. This level of threading technology has never been seen before in a general-purpose microprocessor. Internet, e-Business, and enterprise software applications continue to put higher demands on processors. To improve performance in the past, threading was enabled in the software by splitting instructions into multiple streams so that multiple processors could act upon them. Today with Hyper-Threading Technology, processor-level threading can be utilized which offers more efficient use of processor resources for greater parallelism and improved performance on today's multi-threaded software.

Hyper-Threading Technology provides thread-level-parallelism (TLP) on each processor resulting in increased utilization of processor execution resources. As a result, resource utilization yields higher processing throughput. Hyper-Threading Technology is a form of simultaneous multi-threading technology (SMT) where multiple threads of software applications can be run simultaneously on one processor. This is achieved by duplicating the architectural state on each processor, while sharing one set of processor execution resources. Hyper-Threading Technology also delivers faster response times for multi-tasking workload environments. By allowing the processor to use on-die resources that would otherwise have been idle, Hyper-Threading Technology provides a performance boost on multi-threading and multi-tasking operations for the Intel NetBurst® microarchitecture.

This technology is largely invisible to the platform. In fact, many applications are already multi-threaded and will automatically benefit from this technology. However, multi-threaded applications take full advantage of the increased performance that Hyper-Threading Technology has to offer, allowing users will see immediate performance gains when multitasking. Today's multi-processing aware software is also compatible with Hyper-Threading Technology enabled platforms, but further performance gains can be realized by specifically tuning software for Hyper-Threading Technology. This technology complements traditional multi-processing by providing additional headroom for future software optimizations and business growth.

Hyper-Pipelined Technology

The hyper-pipelined technology of the Intel NetBurst micro architecture increases the pipeline depth delivering increased performance, frequency, and scalability of the processor. One of the key pipelines, the branch prediction/recovery pipeline, is implemented in 31 stages on the 90 nm Pentium® 4 processor, compared to 20 stages on the 0.13 micron Pentium® 4 processor.

800 MHz System Bus

In the Pentium® 4 processor with 800 MHz system bus, the bus supports Intel's highest-performance desktop processor by delivering 6.4 GB of data-per-second into and out of the processor. This is accomplished through a physical signaling scheme of quad-pumping the data transfers over a 200 MHz clocked system bus and a buffering scheme allowing for sustained 800 MHz data transfers. This compares to 1.06 GB/s delivered on the Pentium® III processor's 133 MHz system bus.

Level 1 Execution Trace Cache

The 90 nm Pentium® 4 processor features 16-KB data cache compared to 8-KB on the 0.13 micron Pentium® 4 processor. In addition to the data cache, the Pentium® 4 processor includes an Execution Trace Cache that stores up to 12-K decoded micro-ops in the order of program execution. This increases performance by removing the decoder from the main execution loop and makes more efficient usage of the cache storage space since instructions that are branched around are not stored. The result is a means to deliver a high volume of instructions to the processor's execution units and a reduction in the overall time required to recover from branches that have been mis-predicted.

1-MB or 512-KB Level 2 Advanced Transfer Cache
The 90 nm process-based Pentium 4 processor features 1-MB L2 Advanced Transfer Cache (ATC) compared to 512-KB on the 0.13 micron process-based Pentium 4 processor. The Level 2 ATC delivers a much higher data throughput channel between the Level 2 cache and the processor core. The Advanced Transfer Cache consists of a 256-bit (32-byte) interface that transfers data on each core clock. As a result, the Pentium 4 processor at 3.40 GHz can deliver a data transfer rate of 108 GB/s. This compares to a transfer rate of 16 GB/s on the Pentium® III processor at 1 GHz. Features of the ATC include:

• Non-Blocking, full speed, on-die level 2 cache
• 8-way set associativity
• 256-bit data bus to the level 2 cache
• Data clocked into and out of the cache every clock cycle

Advanced Dynamic Execution

The Advance Dynamic Execution engine is a very deep, out-of-order speculative execution engine that keeps the execution units executing instructions. It also includes an enhanced branch prediction algorithm that has the net effect of reducing the number of branch mis-predictions.

Enhanced Floating-Point and Multimedia Unit

The Pentium® 4 processor expands the floating-point registers to a full 128-bit and adds an additional register for data movement which helps improve performance on both floating-point and multimedia applications.

Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (SSE3) Instructions

With the introduction of SSE2, the Intel NetBurst micro architecture extended the SIMD capabilities that MMX technology and SSE technology delivered by adding 144 instructions. The next generation 90 nm process-based Pentium® 4 processor introduces the Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (SSE3), which includes 13 additional SIMD instructions over SSE2. The 13 new instructions in SSE3 are primarily designed to improve thread synchronization and specific application areas such as media and gaming.

Features Used for Testing and Performance/Thermal Monitoring

Built-in Self Test (BIST) provides single stuck-at fault coverage of the microcode and large logic arrays, as well as testing of the instruction cache, data cache, Translation Lookaside Buffers (TLBs), and ROMs. IEEE 1149.1 Standard Test Access Port and Boundary Scan mechanism enables testing of the Pentium® 4 processor and system connections through a standard interface. Internal performance counters for performance monitoring and event counting. Includes a Thermal Monitor feature that allows motherboards to be more cost effective.