Pentium 4 was a line of single-core
desktop,
laptop and entry level
server central processing units (CPUs) introduced by
Intel on November 20, 2000 and shipped through August 8, 2008. They had a seventh-generation
x86 microarchitecture, called
NetBurst, which was the company's first all-new design since the introduction of the
P6 microarchitecture of the
Pentium Pro CPUs in 1995. NetBurst differed from P6 (
Pentium III,
II, etc.) by featuring a very deep
instruction pipeline to achieve very high clock speeds. Intel claimed that NetBurst would allow clock speeds of up to 10 GHz in future chips; however, severe problems with heat dissipation (especially with the Prescott Pentium 4) limited CPU clock speeds to a much lower 3.8 GHz.