Intel Extreme Edition 840
Current Price: $1,030.00+ S&H
Stephen Cooper, June 27th, 2005
..:: Introduction ::..
The race to have the first dual core processors on the market has come to an end. Both AMD and Intel have launched their respective dual core processors, AMD with the Athlon 64 X2 series, and Intel sporting the Pentium D’s and Extreme Edition. AMD was the first to disclose plans for a dual core processor, and Intel soon followed after the well documented problems of reaching the 4.0GHz barrier with the “Prescott” core due to tremendous power requirements. The debate over who has the first real dual core processor is still going on with AMD throwing the latest punch at Intel’s solution to dual core with the D and Extreme Edition CPU’s.
The Extreme Edition 840 was released to the press in late April for a rather astounding action, an official preview with performance benchmarks. This was an unheard of event from Intel who normally keeps performance under wraps until the very second the NDA’s lift. AMD soon followed with sanctioned previews of their Athlon 64 X2 chips, and the race was on.
With Intel’s dual core processors, there’s one minor difference between the Pentium D’s and the Extreme Edition processor, and that is core support for Hyper-Threading. The Pentium D processors lack support for Hyper-Threading Technology, unlike the Extreme Edition series. Both these processors will operate off of an 800MHz FSB for the time being, though I’d hope to see a move to 1066MHz sometime in the “near” future.
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