Pentium 4 Extreme Edition gets official outing

WELL, IT HAPPENED and now it's out. Intel's new chip for gamers and enthusiasts was officially unveiled by Lou Burns on the big stage here in the San Jose Convention Centre.

The chip will sport an extra 2Mb of cache and will start at 3.2GHz, as you may have read somewhere earlier.

Lou, whose memory seemed to have returned under the spotlight, told his audience of developers and hacks that the chip, named Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, delivers "awesome performance". Burns said Intel had listened to the gaming community and designed the chip with them in mind. He said the chip will be available to buy in the 30-60-day timeframe.

Intel execs who have been dropping hints of an exciting announcement all week claimed the chip would be "the fastest thing that would be released by any company this year." Strangely, one also claimed that it would be the first time in years that Intel would announce a product at IDF that The INQ didn't know about (cough!)

Intel spokesman George Alfs told the INQ the chip would sport a 800MHz frontside bus allied to the 2.5MB L3 of cache in total. He said the company had worked closely with OEMs who build games systems and who really wanted something for gamers. He said the extra cache would improve the performance of the chip significantly, by reducing the need for the processor to go off to memory for data. This combined with the implementation of Hyperthreading in the chip will deliver unparalleled performance. Both Half-Life2 and Doom 3 will implement Hyperthreading enhancements to exploit the technology.

Mr Burns had earlier shown a brief demo of Half-life2 running on a Prescott system sporting an implementation of PCI Express graphics. Prescott is the next development in the Pentium family and though Burns said its development remained on track he refused to be drawn on a launch date for the product. In the meantime we have the Pentium 4HT EE sitting atop the Pentium performance family tree. Burns said Intel had worked closely with "our partners at ATi" to deliver the PCI Express demo.

Alfs said the P4 HT EE would not be a mainstream part. Since it would be Intel's highest performing Pentium4 offering it would attract gamers and users demanding top performance. He said it would be "a little more expensive" than the regular P4 and would be available from OEMs in November.

The chip will be produced using .13µ technology but will later move to a 90 nanometer process. The chip will initially be available in tray form for systems and will not come boxed at this time. µ

See Also
Pentium 4 Extreme Edition -- Xeon MP yields are damn good, it seems!