NetBurst's Swan Song

Conroe may be coming soon, but until it's here Intel still needs to rely on Pentium 4 revenue in order to help pay the bills, pack the coffers and placate the stockholders. The company's quietly unveiled two speed bumps of its dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition 9xx series in recent months; the 955 a few days after Christmas, and the 965 in mid-March. As review;

• Historically, single-core Pentium Extreme Edition CPUs had larger on-chip caches than their Pentium 4 counterparts and ran at 1066 Mhz front-side-bus speeds (versus a 800 MHz FSB for the Pentium 4). In effect, they were relabeled Xeons, with features such as multi-processor hooks, virtualization and extended addressing ranges unsupported. These EE-vs-P4 distinctions disappeared with Intel's move to dual-core.
• The dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition 840 and Pentium D were both built on Intel's 90 nm process and Prescott CPU core; they fundamentally differed in that the Extreme Edition CPU had HyperThreading enabled while HT was disabled on the Pentium D.

Pentium Extreme Edition 9xx series chips are based on the 65 nm process and follow-on Presler core, which among other things re-enables dual-core 1066 Mhz FSB speeds. The Extreme Edition 955 runs at a 3.46 GHz core clock speed, while the newer Extreme Edition 965 hits 3.73 GHz. Notably, this is as fast as the single-core Pentium Extreme Edition ever achieved, though not as speedy as the 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 pinnacle (albeit, as noted above, with a slower FSB and less cache).

For all the benchmark data on the Extreme Edition 965 (including comparative results versus AMD's FX-60 CPU), see AnandTech and ExtremeTech's writeups; also see the discussion of the results at Slashdot. For past Extreme Edition 955 coverage, again see AnandTech, ExtremeTech and Slashdot; Ars Technica also did a writeup. And to learn more about the EE 965's primary competition, AMD's FX-60 which launched in mid-January, check out (you guessed it) AnandTech, Ars Technica, ExtremeTech and Slashdot. A followon Slashdot post gives comparative EE 955 versus FX-60 results under Linux, a refreshing change of pace from all the other Windows-centric writeups.