In 1995, when Intel began designing Pentium 4 (aka Willamette), the first MMX chip had not been released. The designers realized, however, that by the time Willamette reached the market, MMX would spur demand for multimedia applications and that those applications would become key measures of PC performance.

Indeed, now that Pentium III has reached 1 GHz, it has become clear that 1990s-style applications, such as word processors and spreadsheets, don't really benefit from faster CPUs. Just as 2-D Winmark became an obsolete metric once graphics chips could redraw the screen faster than the eye could see, benchmarks based on the old-style applications become meaningless for super-GHz CPUs.

For that reason, Willamette's designers did not emphasize benchmarks, such as SysMark, that rely primarily on the older productivity applications. As a result, a 1.4-GHz Pentium 4 delivers the same SysMark 2000 performance as a 1-GHz Pentium III.

But those applications don't need more performance. The applications that will tax PCs in the future are 3-D graphics, image manipulation, audio/video compression and voice recognition.

Pentium 4 excels in these areas: On test after test, the new processor outruns Pentium III by 20 percent to 40 percent. The results should also put Pentium 4 ahead of Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon on most multimedia apps.

Presciently, the Willamette team also focused on maximizing the clock speed of their processor. Pentium 4's ultralong pipeline should reach 2 GHz in Intel's 0.18-micron process, nearly doubling the top speed of Pentium III in the same process. Athlon will be hard-pressed to reach 1.5 GHz in a comparable process.

Thus, Intel will emphasize Pentium 4's clock-speed advantage over Athlon and, for more sophisticated users, its advantage on multimedia applications. AMD will point to Athlon's superior performance on benchmarks like SysMark.

Intel undoubtedly wishes that Pentium 4 beat Athlon on SysMark. But the designers made the right choice in emphasizing multimedia performance. As Intel's flagship PC processor for at least the next four years, Pentium 4 is designed to excel on tomorrow's software, not yesterday's.

LInley Gwennap is the Founder and Principal Analyst of the Linley Group (www.linleygroup.com), a Technology Analysis firm in Mountain View, Calif.