The Pentium 4 Netburst architecture was relatively stagnant between the years 2000 and 2004. "Prescott" (2004) was still "Netburst" but Prescott includes AMD64 so I'd say that's a major change.
Still, its reflective in the naming. Netburst, Willamette, Northwood, Prescott, and Tejas were all called "Pentium 4", and lasted from a time period from year 2000 to 2006.
Sure, there were a few additions: Hyperthreading I guess. But otherwise, the main difference in this timeframe were the 250nm to 90nm scaling (which got "free" GHz upgrades back then without any effort)
In short:
> what we used to call the 'annual upgrade.'
You're exaggerating. Progress has slowed but Willamette (year 2000 1.5GHz) vs Northwood (year 2002 2GHz) Pentium 4s weren't that dissimilar.
Prescott (2004) is even more amusing, as it hit 3.8GHz (Intel Pentium 4 570J). But boy, oh boy... you really can't compare Prescott 3.8GHz against Sandy Bridge (2011, 3.6GHz) or Coffee Lake (2018, 3.6GHz ), even if the base clocks are all close.
And luckily we had AMD then, as we do now (only recently), to pick up the slack. Sure I'm exaggerating a bit, but no more than you are to say 'incomparable'. Intel upgrades for the last 7 years have been modest at best. If you need a new machine, sure they'll make a fine replacement. But hardly a reason to upgrade year over year (or even every 2-3 years) for performance and/or functionality alone.
I've been sitting on an old i7 Sandy Bridge precisely because Intel hasn't been offering me a compelling reason to upgrade. I'm probably going to finally do it next year... but it won't be to another Intel system.
1. Sandy Bridge to Skylake combined makes barely a double digit gain in IPC, ~roughly 14%. I hardly called that a "huge advancements" in IPC over 7 years time.
2. We have already proved should the SandyBridge Overclocked to 4GHz+ it would have perform faster in some cases than Skylake Uarch with same Clock Speed. Remember SandyBridge was 32nm.
3. "Netburst, Willamette, Northwood, Prescott, and Tejas " You made it sounds as if there were many generation. All of them are part of Netburst uArch and Willamette was the first Gen, Tejas was cancelled. So there is only "Willamette, Northwood, Prescott". Each with much improved Clock speed, better implementation of HT, better memory controller and cache read improvement, and finally AMD64, all translate to substantial performance improvement, regardless of its power usage.
Netburst may not be a good uArch, but it definitely brings many improvement, the writing was on the wall in 2004 and we got Core 2 in 2006. And we have been stuck with Quad Core Desktop CPU despite we have had over 4x transistor density improvement.
Still, its reflective in the naming. Netburst, Willamette, Northwood, Prescott, and Tejas were all called "Pentium 4", and lasted from a time period from year 2000 to 2006.
Sure, there were a few additions: Hyperthreading I guess. But otherwise, the main difference in this timeframe were the 250nm to 90nm scaling (which got "free" GHz upgrades back then without any effort)
In short:
> what we used to call the 'annual upgrade.'
You're exaggerating. Progress has slowed but Willamette (year 2000 1.5GHz) vs Northwood (year 2002 2GHz) Pentium 4s weren't that dissimilar.
Prescott (2004) is even more amusing, as it hit 3.8GHz (Intel Pentium 4 570J). But boy, oh boy... you really can't compare Prescott 3.8GHz against Sandy Bridge (2011, 3.6GHz) or Coffee Lake (2018, 3.6GHz ), even if the base clocks are all close.