Ah yes, as 2005 comes to an end Intel has decided to sneak in one last processor launch before 2006 comes. 2005 has been quite an interesting year for Intel with their early launch of Smithfield dual-core processors and announcement that Netburst will be reaching the end of its life cycle. While Intel held the performance crown for a while with their Northwood core Pentium 4?s they were dethroned when AMD finally launched the Athlon 64. Intel fan?s who hoped the then soon-to-be-announced Prescott would?ve regained Intel?s performance crown were disappointed to find a hotter, power hungrier, and deeper pipeline processor that couldn?t beat out the Athlon 64?s performance.
 
After close to six years of the original Pentium 4 ?Willamette? core?s disappointing unveiling we?ve finally reached the end of the road of Intel?s Netburst architecture with Presler. Soon Netburst will be nothing but a forgotten memory when Conroe/Merom hit the streets, however Intel has given Netburst one last hurrah by shrinking the die from 90nm to 65nm?a first for desktop processors. Intel also has added a few other enhancements to the package but will this be enough to give Intel the performance crown once again??Enter the Extreme Edition 955.

(Smithfield)

Current Smithfield dual core processors are essentially two Prescott cores glued together on a single die.. This method was a quick and easy way to get engineer dual core processors but was quite expensive and had lower yields as one bad core would mean both had to be thrown out.

(Presler/Cedar Mill)

Presler core processors are actually manufactured as two dice that share a same package. If one die fails QA tests it can be cut off and used in single core Cedar Mill products. This allows Intel to maximize use of each wafer and keep costs down since fewer cores are being thrown out.

In addition to a new packaging process Presler brings a new manufacturing process for Intel as well. The new 65nm manufacturing process uses second generation strained silicon technology and has less leakage compared to the existing 90nm Prescott and Smithfield. This should theoretically allow Presler and Cedar Mill products to operate at lower voltages, consume less power, and run cooler.

Presler also comes with double the cache of the existing Smithfield bringing the amount of cache to 2MB per core. The extra cache should help out in gaming, media encoding, and other floating point and memory intensive applications. Existing support for Intel?s xD (No Execute bit) and EM64T (x86-64 extensions) remain supported with Presler and Cedar Mill products. The front side bus also gets a nice bump to 1066 MHz from Smithfield?s 800 MHz. This should allow the bandwidth hungry Netburst processors to even receive more bandwidth and take advantage of DDR-2 800 memory.

Support for Intel?s Vanderpool virtualization technology has also made its way into Presler products. The new technology will allow users to run multiple operating systems on top of a host operating system with little performance loss. As with all new features software support is also needed as well. VMware Workstation 5.5 offers experimental support for Vanderpool technology but we?ll be diving further into that in a later article.

A new model number is also in order for Presler systems. While existing dual core products carried an 8xx model number new Presler products will use a 9xx numbering scheme to differentiate it from Smithfield products. This is much like the existing 5xx/6xx series model number separation to signify large cache and different technology support (EM64T).

The extra cache and new features increases Presler?s transistor count to 376 million?a 39% increase from Smithfield?s 230 million transistors.

Extreme Edition 955

Since manufacturers tend to launch their top end product first and have lower models trickle down the channel later its no surprise Intel has launched an Extreme Edition as the first Presler product. Intel?s Extreme Edition processors have always been their cr�me of the crop that offers the best they have to offer in a high end enthusiast product. It?s usually based on their high end consumer processors with a few tweaks to justify a $999.99 MSRP. If the consumer-level Pentium D was metaphoric BMW 545i the Extreme Edition is an M5?faster with a premium price for those willing to pay.

Whether or not the extra costs of an Extreme Edition is worth it or not is up to you. Much like Smithfield Extreme Edition?s the Presler Extreme Edition is essentially a Pentium D with Hyper Threading enabled. As games have only recently started supporting multithreading Hyper Threading shouldn?t make much difference in gaming. However for media encoding and rendering tasks Hyper Threading should give the Extreme Edition an extra little boost in performance as it has with single core processors.

For the price of a complete system you get the Intel Extreme Edition 955. With two cores clocked at 3.46 GHz the Extreme Edition is clocked a full GHz higher than AMD?s fastest X2 4800+ processor. A front-side bus of 1066 MHz keeps the bandwidth hungry Netburst architecture happy and is clocked higher than the general population?s main computer. Intel?s Hyper Threading technology tops off the package and makes the Extreme Edition 955 show up as four processors in Windows?which is quite nice for bragging rights for those less technically inclined.

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• Test setup... (1 of 6)
• SiSoft Sandra, ScienceMark 2... (2 of 6)
• Cinebench, Encoding... (3 of 6)
• Gaming... (4 of 6)
• Power consumption, noise... (5 of 6)
• Conclusion... (6 of 6)