Date: February 16th, 2004.
Article by: Nathan Glentworth
(Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: Intel
<--Shop for the P4 3.2Ghz Extreme Edition Processor Here
INTEL CORPORATE PROFILE
For more than three decades, Intel Corporation has developed
technology enabling the computer and Internet revolution that has changed
the world. Founded in 1968 to build semiconductor memory products, Intel
introduced the world's first microprocessor in 1971. Today, Intel supplies
the computing and communications industries with chips, boards, systems,
and software building blocks that are the "ingredients" of computers,
servers and networking and communications products. These products are
used by industry members to create advanced computing and communications
systems. Intel's mission is to be the preeminent building block supplier
to the Internet economy.
PRODUCT INTRODUCTION
As the processor battle still wages on, a simple choice
for your next computer upgrade is becoming even more of a daunting task.
With AMD's luke warm release of the Athlon64, consumers are still hesitant
to jump to 64-bit computing and with the cost/performance not being
too impressive at the moment with the lack of 64-bit software, I don't
blame them.
Intel on the other hand has held back from jumping into
the 64-bit desktop computing pool and has instead released a slightly
improved Pentium4 based on the Prescott core. But what is the fastest
readily available processor on the market today? It would hands down
have to be the last of the northwood, the Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition.
(Courtesy of Intel)
With two clock flavors of 3.2 and 3.4Ghz, they actually
vary little from the standard core other than the inclusion of a huge
2MB L3 onboard cache (no L3 cache on a standard P4), reduced availability
and a large pricetag. With more on-die cache, faster processing can
be executed through data stored within the faster on-die memory rather
than having to relying on extracting information to process from the
much slower system ram and/or hard drive.
As you will see through the benchmarking and testing,
the 2MB L3 cache is no marketing ploy, it does give you an extra kick
in the performance department when compared to the standard northwood.
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