TODAY INTEL UNVEILS its 1.7GHz version of the Pentium 4 processor. The 1.7GHz Pentium 4 is just a frequency ramp, not a substantially new part, but it's appropriate to consider its performance now that the P4 has been around for a while. We've already explored the Pentium 4 in our initial review of the processor, and we've seen how it matches up with its fiercest competitor, the AMD Athlon.

The release of this new, faster Pentium 4 presents us with the opportunity to re-examine some of those issues, and to unearth some stones we've left unturned. New versions of many benchmark programs have become available recently, and we've updated our test suite to reflect that fact.

We're also going to take a look at how this new Pentium 4 performs on some tests you may not have seen used before. Some of those tests allow us to use multiple binaries compiled with different sorts of optimizations. The results should be revealing, so read on to see what we found.