At the core of the Pentium 4 is a 20-stage pipeline. Intel's ADD reminiscent marketing term for the new pipeline, borrowed in part from NVIDIA's "HyperTexel Pipelines," is "Hyper Pipelined Technology." By lengthening the pipeline from ten stages with the P6 micro-architecture to 20 stages with the Intel NetBurst Micro-Architecture, Intel is able to up the clock speed dramatically. The first Pentium 4 parts are expected to ship at 1.4GHz or greater, up to 266MHz higher than the nearest Pentium III has reached.

More importantly, the deep pipelining gives the Intel NetBurst Micro-Architecture the headroom needed for future CPUs. The five-stage pipeline of the P5 micro-architecture started at 60MHz and peaked at 233MHz, a four times higher clock. The ten stage P6 micro-architecture started at 150MHz and has so far peaked at 1.13GHz, a 7.5 times higher clock. The Pentium 4 is expected to start at 1.4GHz. Someday we might see more than 10GHz out of Intel NetBurst Micro-Architecture based processors.

The bane of the modern processor is a wasted cycle. To minimize wasted cycles, the Pentium 4's Intel NetBurst Micro-Architecture includes a deep, out-of-order speculative execution engine. Intel's "gee-whiz" marketing term for the improvements is "Advanced Dynamic Execution." By keeping up to 126 instructions in progress at one time, three times what the P6 micro-architecture could do, and by using better branch prediction algorithms, the Pentium 4 can keep its logic units well fed and therefore processing more constantly than the Pentium III could. Intel says that they "have reduced the number of missed branches by approximately 30% from that of the P6." That is an impressive achievement and should make a significant difference to overall speed.