Intel Corp.is planning to introduce a faster front-side bus on an upcoming version of its Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor that will help the firm increase the performance of its chips by improving a crucial bottleneck in system performance.
According to an internal document on Intel's Web site first spotted by The Inquirer, Intel will soon release the 925XE chip set, a version of its recently introduced 925X chip set with support for a 1066MHz front-side bus. Current Pentium 4 chip sets use an 800MHz front-side bus to connect the processor to the memory. This is a vital link, or bottleneck, that plays an important role in determining the overall performance of a system.
Intel will also release a 3.46GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition that supports the 1066MHz front-side bus in the near future, according to a separate document found on Intel's site. This chip will also come with 2MB of Level 3 cache, just like its counterparts in the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition category.
The Pentium 4 Extreme Edition chip is Intel's performance leader for desktop PCs. But that performance comes at a premium, as the chip costs more than twice as much as the most powerful Pentium 4 processor. It is marketed almost exclusively to gamers.
_______________
Read More:
infoworld
Oct 1, 2004, 05:30 PM
