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The Netburst architecture was designed by the marketing department of Intel. It was their way to win the MHz race. They never quite got those 5 GHz CPUs, though, as leakage went through the roof with later revisions. The Netburst design has an insanely long pipeline (~32 stages, vs ~16 for the K7 and PIII), meaning lots of stalls and pipeline flushing. Only its insanely high operating frequency managed to save it from its own lacking design by brute-forcing things. It was not an elegant, subtle, well-designed or or very scalable design, hence it isn't so strange that no trace of it is left in current Intel designs.
It's not so strange to see lots of P4 systems still in use, though. The P4 was launched at the beginning of the 1+ GHz era, which basically is still fast enough for most people, especially at schools and businesses where those systems do little more than allow people to work on text documents and the occasional picture.
As for Atom, Atom is a bit PII/PIII-ish, although it also lacks some important parts of those cores, most notably the out-of-order unit. This to save die space and cut down power usage. Of course, it also reduces performance significantly. They'd have done better to cut out the x86 instruction uOPs decoding unit, as it's one of the largest modules of Atom. I'd still take a Cortex-9-based system over an Atom-based one.
It's not so strange to see lots of P4 systems still in use, though. The P4 was launched at the beginning of the 1+ GHz era, which basically is still fast enough for most people, especially at schools and businesses where those systems do little more than allow people to work on text documents and the occasional picture.
As for Atom, Atom is a bit PII/PIII-ish, although it also lacks some important parts of those cores, most notably the out-of-order unit. This to save die space and cut down power usage. Of course, it also reduces performance significantly. They'd have done better to cut out the x86 instruction uOPs decoding unit, as it's one of the largest modules of Atom. I'd still take a Cortex-9-based system over an Atom-based one.
