Intel Pentium 4 631 (3 GHz)

The 'Cedar Mill' core was released on January 5, 2006; about half a year before the Core 2 Duo hit the market. Basically this 3GHz Pentium 4 631 is a die-shrink of the Prescott-core from 2004 (but with 2MB L2-cache). Sometimes it's said that technology development continues at a rapid pace but this particular Pentium 4 shows it isn't always the case. Yes, improvements are made but performance-wise this CPU isn't much faster than the top-of-the-line 3.06GHz Pentium 4 from late 2002. This particular Pentium 4 631 is made in the 39th week of 2007: that's five years later without much improvement.

Of course in this time-frame the Pentium 4 was degraded to the budget platform since the Core 2 Duo took over the high-end platform. Nevertheless in any case I would never have recommended buying this old technology new in 2007. Eventually this one never sold to a customer because the box has never been opened.