Intel Launches New Pentium Extreme Edition 965

RL-20 II Rider writes "Although Intel is hard at work readying their next-gen Conroe core for a proposed 2H '06 release, it seems engineers at the company are still improving upon the existing 65nm Presler core. This review of the brand-new 3.73GHz Pentium Extreme Edition 965 dual-core processor shows that the CPU is based on a new stepping of the Presler core that runs cooler and overclocks higher than older chips, while consuming a bit less power as well."

Comments

Extreme edition?

[Mr. Bad Example]

Does it only work if you're snowboarding down a hillside and parachuting off a cliff while slamming a Mountain Dew?

Re:Extreme edition?

[Moby Cock]

Quad Core Radical Edition

In 2010, will your razor have more blades than your CPU has cores, or the other way around? I wonder...

Re:Extreme edition?

[digitaldc]

In 2010, will your razor have more blades than your CPU has cores, or the other way around? I wonder...

Neither, your CPU will be so powerful that it will shoot out a laser which can be used for hair removal, cosmetic surgery, and enemy annihilation (among other things.)

Pentium Name

[hsmith]

I thought they were dropping the Pentium name?

Re:Pentium Name

[ciroknight]

This is still the Pentium 4; they're not dropping the Pentium Name on a chip that's still a Pentium, which they're still selling and still are going to sell for about another year until the Core chips take over the market. It's called "Phasing Out" a product in marketing speak.

Re:Pentium Name

[jawtheshark]

Except that it isn't exactly the "base architecture". I don't know for the P-IV, but I do know that both the P-II and P-III were both based on the Pentium Pro, which introduced the concept of a x86 front-end with a RISC backend.

Today, if we talk about x86 compatibility, we rarely talk about 386 compatibility. The *least* would be 486DX, since the 386 didn't have FPU. Personally, I consider the PPro to be the current base architecture. Hey, I had a PPro200 and it served our family well as a desktop until late 2002 .

Fuck the metric system

[Anonymous Coward]

65 nm = 43/16777216 inches

Re:Fuck the metric system

[twiddlingbits]

Can you translate that to furlongs per fortnight or hogsheads per rod? ;)

Oblig. Spaceballs

[lbmouse]

Colonel Sandurz: Prepare to purchase an Intel Pentium Extreme Edition.
Dark Helmet: No. No. No. No. Extreme is too slow.
Colonel Sandurz: Extreme too slow?
Dark Helmet: Yes. We're gonna have to go straight to an Intel Pentium Ludicrous Edition.

Re:Oblig. Spaceballs

[rubberbando]

Does that mean when Windows crashes on it, they'll get the PLAID screen of death?

Wicked

[smoor]

Oooh, next they'll the have the Pentium WICKED, followed by the Pentium WOOT!

Re:Wicked

[MikeSty]

All of which will be succeeded by Pentium PWNED Edition

Intel should be ashamed.

[LibertineR]

My AMD Athlon 64 X2 chugs along at 2.2Ghz, and STILL blows Intel out of the water due to its superior design, while managing a cool 29C. AMD has fought the good fight, and until Intel gets faster AND cooler, AMD has my computing dollar. To me, the only thing 'Extreme' about Intel processors right now, is the number of CPU cycles wasted.

Re:Intel should be ashamed.

[ciroknight]

Good think Intel invented the Core chips. Because you know, using 40% of the power of a Pentium 4 and doing 40% more work while clocking nearly twice as slow isn't a radical change or anything.

Preliminary reports even say the Core chips are up to 35% faster than the AMD64 chips, and they don't even have EM64T to fall back on. But, for the purposes of this discussion, since this is a Pentium 4, it is still quite the power hog, but they've made advances with this chip that do warrant some attention (take a look at the benchmarks), and with their new $50 water cooler and overclocking, the Pentium 4 once again takes the performance crown.

I'm all for AMD, but Intel has cleaned up their act too, and refusing to notice that is a fatal mistake, no matter how much Slashdot/AMD coolaid you've consumed.

Re:Intel should be ashamed.

[Enigma_Man]

and refusing to notice that is a fatal mistake

Yes... you will infact DIE if you have not noticed that.

-Jesse

Re:Intel should be ashamed.

[fitten]

This was some of the biggest news in a while and it all happened about 1.5 weeks ago (where were you?:P)... Here are some from Anandtech.

This one is the preliminary benchmark testing that a lot of folks questioned and this one is the follow up that answered a lot of the concerns about the first one. The conclusion was the same, though... at 2.66GHz Conroe beats an overclocked 2.8GHz FX-60 (overclocked to simulate the upcoming FX-62) quite handily (20%+ most of the time) while using 1/2 the power of the AMD part (and obviously at a lower clock speed). There were a few other sites that had similar previews but they all say the same thing.

Re:Intel should be ashamed.

[default luser]

Hey, I agree wholehartedly, and I've been an AMD fanboy since the release of the P4.

Anyone who can look at this breakdown of the new Core design, understand it, and STILL proclaim AMD the performance leader is retarded. The extra simple decoder means potentially 33% more thoroughput out the gate, and the fused micro-ops can add another 5-10% performance improvement (assuming you have enough execution units to use all this). The 128-bit SSE unit, plus the ability for simple decoders to handle packed SSE instructions, also means double the speed at vector operations.

That said, at least I had my just desserts. I always said superpipelined Netburst was a retarded design, and the fact that Intel went and developed Conroe only validates my claim.

I am still curious to see the power usage of Core. It should be less than the P4, but whether it is competitive with AMD may be another story. Hopefully AMD will finally get off their ass and improve their own design, which hasn't changed much since the K7 (onboard memory controller aside). Who knows, I may end up buying Conroe, and becomean Intel fanboy again.

extreme?

[matt328]

I donno, brand new chip, catchy performance implying name, about the only thing extreme about this chip will be the price. All of you people who get off on bragging about their box's specs in your little forum sigs prepare to shell out your 2 grand to upgrade from that now outdated 3.4 ghz piece of crap you've somehow been putting up with.

Not trying to troll, just pointing out the extremely narrow audience this chip would appeal to given that they are moving on to a different core soon. I'm just hoping this will drive down costs of the 'lower end' dual core chips soon.

Ironic

[Ctrl Alt De1337]

Ironic that a site reviewing a P4 Extreme Edition is called "Hot Hardware." Hot, indeed.

Re:Ironic

[jonesy16]

What's not ironic is that an anti Intel post was made without reading the FA. The AMD processors actually put out more heat than this processor when idle (which is most of the time for most computer users). Intel has made progress with their 65 nm design in reducing heat and power consumption.

Also reviewed at The Tech Report

[EconolineCrush]

Also reviewed at The Tech Report, with more extensive testing against a wider range of processors.

ExtremeTech, Tom's, Anand reviews

[ThinSkin]

Other reviews:....

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1940865 ,00.asp

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/22/pentium_ext reme_edition_965/

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2725

Questions

[zymano]

Does chip wiring or transistors waste the most heat ?

I don't understand why there aren't any attempts made to move away from silicon & copper/aluminum wiring ?

We have quantum tunneling transistors that work right now !

http://www.google.com/search?q=quantum+tunneling+t ransistors&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefo x-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
http://www.sandia.gov/media/quantran.htm

Re:apache estimate

[Enigma_Man]

23.1

Pentium Extreme Edition

[NullProg]

New acronym alert:

      PEE

Yeah, what the fuck?

[babbling]

Intel are so off on this one. Just from a preliminary glance, I can see that they named this chip wrong. "Pentium Extreme Edition 965"? Where should I start?

First of all, this chip is at the very least an Extreme Turbo Edition 1078. However, I have a strong suspicion about it being closer to a Super Mega Extreme Turbo 8000.

bottleneck order

[porkThreeWays]

bottleneck order for you: network bandwidth, hard drive, ram, then _maybe_ cpu.

Basically, it isn't going to help you much. If you put a lot of ram into it that'd probably help (try to get as much into ram as possible). If you have a huge amount of pics (60 gigs) a 10,000 rpm Raptor sata would probably be a good investment.

All that doesn't mean much if the network pipe is too small to dish out that many pics.

Re:Singlethreaded performance

[KBAegis]

Funny thing, I seem to have misread the cores names as 'Ownya/yermom.'

It's misleading advertising

[Bullfish]

I think by now most of us on these kinds of discussion boards know that the price differential between the extreme and non-extreme versions of Intel chips is not worth the extra punch that the cache increase extreme denotes. Unfortunately, they will sell a lot of these to people who don't know any better. Some of them will be to people we know who will then wonder why our cheaper machines perform the same or better. Others will remain convinced that they bought the best and will lash themselves to believing they were not duped.

To me, this is indicative of a lot of the market now. Really, you don't need a 700 dollar video card to play any game out on the market. True, with the more expensive card you will get better resolutions on very large or multiple monitors, but most people don't have them. I know people whole have 17 inch monitors who were almost suckered by the hype that you need a high priced card just to play FEAR at all. Ditto, BF2. This really has been driven by the hardware companies and hardware sites that like to torture test hardware. Not in and of itself a bad thing, but to the uninitiated, it can be misleading. Especially when coupled with hardware companies that implicitly promote this untruth.

Unfortunately, the extreme edition etc, is symbolic of companies that feel a loss because their profit slipped from the previous year, in spite of the fact they are still making good money. No doubt some of these execs still sleep at night dreaming of another Y2K scam to rake in the dollars from sales of hardware most people don't need, or in the end, even want.

That is what I believe is at the root of this kind of marketing. And I don't see it going away, I see it becoming more rife.