What is clear is that Intel is accelerating its own roadmap to put the Pentium 4 out of reach of any competitors. Intel pointed out that the transition from a 1 GHz Pentium 4 to a 2 GHz part took about 4 months. This is a much steeper climb than in previous P6 and P5 architectures where frequency jumps of such significance took years to achieve.

But what does all this speed mean? It's possible that a 1GHz PC today will be able to run applications that are released 3 years down the track. That's with the rate of program advancements. If more advanced programs come out, then we'll need speedier computers. But the advancements on computer hardware has been much greater then on software. With the latest GeForce 3 graphics chip, there are few games, if any, that take advantage of it (at time of writing). Even with the GeForce 2 - there's only been a few games that took advantage of that chip. But its only now (15 months after GTS Chip Version release) that we see applications that use the GeForce 2 chip features.