Intel Pentium 4 EE 3.74 to arise on Feb 21st

INTEL IS READY to introduce its next member of its Extreme Expensive family. Intel decided to introduce this CPU on the 20th/21st of February. This new member will feature 2MB of L2 cache.

We already saw 2MB of cache and the 1066MHz front side bus (FSB) with the last 3.46 Pentium 4 Extreme edition CPU but this new faster fellow will provide some new features.

This will be the first Extremely Expensive edition with 64 bit support. This chip will work with Windows 64 bit and as we reported yesterday, you can already get RC 2.0 version from the internet. Intel calls its 64 bit support EM64T, making a rather sarcastic point about AMD's naming schema.

It will also have execute bit disable (XD) option that will save you from some viruses executing you if you have downloaded Service Pack 2. This CPU is built on the now infamous 90 nanometre marchitecture and will have 169 million of transistors on a 135 square millimetre die. That's a lot of switches!

We are not surprised to hear that 6xx generation of Intel CPU comes with some new features such as Enhanced SpeedStop technology similar to Centrino. This marchitecture will declock your CPU if you don't need all the power and keep it a little bit cooler. You again need SP2 for these power saving features, although it's quite possible the Linux boys were ahead of this particular envelope being licked.

To me, this sounds awfully like an Athlon 64/FX feature set and all of these features, apart from 2MB of cache have been available for quite some time. Again I cannot disregard the fact that Intel is ready with 64 bit CPUs just in the dawn of the Windows 64 bit edition. µ