Tuesday, April 5, 2005
Pentium Extreme Edition model 840 3.2GHz - Dual-Core CPU
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 11:00 AM
"Pentium 4 is dead, and in its place we get two flavours of dual core processor for the desktop. The king of the heap is Pentium Extreme Edition which has dual cores with Hyper-Threading so one physical processor appears as four virtual processors. This will inevitably be the US $999 part that looks good on paper but doesn’t get bought so Intel came up with the bright idea of a dual core part called Pentium D that doesn’t have Hyper-Threading. It runs on the same 800MHz FSB and has the same cache but it appears as two virtual processors, just like the current Prescott. No doubt Pentium Extreme Edition will move to a 1066MHz FSB, which will allow Intel to enable HT in Pentium D but for now it all looks like a bit of a marketing nightmare."
I've been looking forward to dual-core CPUs for a while now, but not for the reason that most are: I was using a dual Celeron 400mhz Abit BP-6 rig years ago, so I'm very familiar with what the real benefits of multiple processors are. In some applications, those designed to take advantage multiple CPUs, there can be huge performance boosts. Encoding a video with four CPUs (two physical, two virtual) will be radically faster, but will four CPUs help you start Word faster? No. What it will do, however is allow two things:
1) You can do more at once without fear of one application stomping on another. For example, when I play a game on my laptop I always shut everything else down to get maximum performance. I might not need to do that anymore on a system with multiple CPUs, although there would have to be an operating system change as well to prevent other applications from throwing pop-up windows into your full-screen gaming experience.
2) Programs will be able to run background tasks that would otherwise bog down a machine. For example, Windows Media Player could finally get true network folder monitoring, constantly scanning for new files and updating the library instead of the broken, twitchy experience we have now. :roll:
I've been looking forward to dual-core CPUs for a while now, but not for the reason that most are: I was using a dual Celeron 400mhz Abit BP-6 rig years ago, so I'm very familiar with what the real benefits of multiple processors are. In some applications, those designed to take advantage multiple CPUs, there can be huge performance boosts. Encoding a video with four CPUs (two physical, two virtual) will be radically faster, but will four CPUs help you start Word faster? No. What it will do, however is allow two things:
1) You can do more at once without fear of one application stomping on another. For example, when I play a game on my laptop I always shut everything else down to get maximum performance. I might not need to do that anymore on a system with multiple CPUs, although there would have to be an operating system change as well to prevent other applications from throwing pop-up windows into your full-screen gaming experience.
2) Programs will be able to run background tasks that would otherwise bog down a machine. For example, Windows Media Player could finally get true network folder monitoring, constantly scanning for new files and updating the library instead of the broken, twitchy experience we have now. :roll:
