Hexus has posted a review on the VIA P4 platform and the 2Ghz P4

For quite some time the current pinnacle of Intel's consumer x86 processor range has been the 2Ghz Pentium 4. The Pentium 4, initially announced by Intel here on the 20th November 2000. Released in 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz flavours in the Socket 423 package it was partnered on release by the i850 chipset which interfaced with RAMBUS dual channel RDRAM modules.

At the time Intel were making (and still are) a lot of fuss about NetBurst, the underlying architecture on the P4 processor. They are banking on NetBurst to give the P4 world beating performance as the clock speeds are ramped up well into the high 2GHz range as the technology scales very well with high clock speed. However at the time of launch it was agreed that while the new processors were technologically impressive, the low IPC of the processor architecture due to its design didn't give them incredible performance at the launched speeds.

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