Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition 840 and 955X Express chipset

[Steve]

The 3.2GHz Pentium XE 840 is offered as an alternative to current single-core Extreme Edition CPUs. It may not quite have the pure gaming performance punch as, say, the 3.73GHz XE, but it's a better proposition when considered over a wide variety of applications. Think of it this way. The worst-case performance scenario is that the £650 Pentium XE 840 performs much like a single-core 3.2GHz 640 model. The best-case scenario, that is, being run with apps. that take advantage of its 4-thread parallel processing ability, is performance that no single-core Pentium 4 could ever hope to match, even under the most esoteric cooling.

http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews...lld19JRD0xMDg1

[myth]

Dual core.... And to think I just bought this lame 3500 and Neo 2 plat mobo! Why does this always hapen to me?

[csl]

nice article.

very tasty - something multi-threaded like Cubase would fly on one of these (I hope anyway!)

[Steve]

Dual core is going to rock my world be because I'm a heavy multitasker. I look forward to a dual core AMD/Intel showdown however, and while I am impressed Intel were first getting samples to us (and others) for review, I expect waiting for AMD's offering will be worth it

We've seen tidbits of AMD stuff for a while now - from the first working dual core opteron to demos of the dual core systems at various trade shows, however with Intel it seems have been all go from IDF last month through to now.

[Jonny M]

I can see myself selling up and scraping together and chucking together a dual core, PCI-E, BTX rig at some point in the future

[skuzgib]

I winder what the dual core looks like when you pop the heatspreader off?

[andycher]

Hi, I am very dissapointed with this review. Dual Core CPU 840 system should be compared to dual CPU system like dual-Xeon or Dual-Opteron!!!

W H Y N O T ! ! ! ! ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

[myth]

Hi, I am very dissapointed with this review. Dual Core CPU 840 system should be compared to dual CPU system like dual-Xeon or Dual-Opteron!!!

W H Y N O T ! ! ! ! ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

because its not a server cpu, its ment for evry day users and gaming freaks. I dont know many peeps that run xeons in there main home pc nor optrons...

[oralpain]

I intend to run a dual-core opteron in my gaming PC. Should improve performance while recording video with FRAPS.

The reason you don't really need to compaire the dual core pentiums to xeons is that you can just look at a dual cpu xeon system and get something very close.

[DR]

Hi, I am very dissapointed with this review. Dual Core CPU 840 system should be compared to dual CPU system like dual-Xeon or Dual-Opteron!!!

W H Y N O T ! ! ! ! ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

Because this is not a CPU for that market - this is an end user/enthusiast CPU - sure it will end up in workstations - due to the pure performance, but it is not aimed at that market.

Wait for Dual Core HT Enabled Xeons - and 2 of them Imagine it - 8 Virtual Threads, 4 Phsyical Cores, 2 sockets!

[DR]

nice article.

very tasty - something multi-threaded like Cubase would fly on one of these (I hope anyway!)

Yes - we will run some numbers too soon.

[DavidM]

A comparisson with the FX-55 would have been good

[suryad]

A comparisson with the FX-55 would have been good

Err I thought they had FX numbers in there as well..

Anyway, I personally cant wait for the day we have dual core FX's clocked @ 3 GHz. I read that the Venice cores run @ 2.88 overclocked with no problems with air cooling so the 3ghz is not entirely unrealistic.

What gets me still is why the AMDs are still so damn slow at media benchmarks. I mean Windows Movie Maker numbers were pathetic. I know it is my lack of ignorance as to the architecture differences between the 2 cpus but I would like to know why the FX is so slow in those scenarios.

Anyway, these dual core benches mean only one thing...competition this year between AMD and Intel are going to be quite heated. Wonder if AMD will win this round.

[oralpain]

Lack of ignorance, eh?

Anyway here is an explanaition. Firstly, the biggest disadvantage of the P4s is the very long pipeline (31 stages). This disadvantage does not apply much to most encoding, as it is easy to predict, so there are rarely pipeline stalls. Secondly, encoding is not really memory latency sensitive. Thirdly, it's all done with SSE/2/3 and P4s can execute the same number of these instructions per clock as an Athlon 64.

Basically clock for clock a P4 and an A64 are almsot the same at encoding with Movie Maker, and the P4 has a much higher clock speed.

[DR]

I am looking forward to seeing multi-core on the netburst replacement tech...

[StormPC]

A comparisson with the FX-55 would have been good

The FX-55 would have made the 840 look even worse so they chose the outdated FX-53 instead. They probably used an FX-55 and just dropped the multiplier by 1 lowering the clock to 2.4GHz.

Can anybody offer any other reason why they compared the FX-53 (one and a half generations old tech) to the Intel's newest tech?