A half-dozen high-speed processors have been added to Intel's Pentium 4 family. They sport 800-MHz front-side buses, hyperthreading technology, and clock speeds of 2.8, 3.0, 3.2, and 3.4 GHz.
Manufactured with the company's 130-nm process, two of the CPUs operate at 3.4 GHz and come with an on-chip 512-kbyte level 2 cache. One of those two CPUs, dubbed the Extreme Edition, targets gamers and power users. It packs an additional 2-Mbyte level 3 cache and is designed to work with the 875P motherboard chip set. In 1000-unit lots, it costs $999 each. The other 130-nm processor goes for $417 apiece in similar quantities.
The remaining four CPUs, which employ Intel's latest 90-nm process, are based on what the company internally calls the Prescott microarchitecture. Each includes a 1-Mbyte level 2 on-chip cache and can use either the 865 or 875P motherboard chip sets. The L2 and L1 caches are double the size of previous-generation P4 CPUs. They sport an improved hardware prefetcher to minimize processor stalls due to slow memory accesses. These CPUs also pack 13 new instructions that accelerate the performance of Streaming SIMD extensions technology and floating-point math operations.
The CPUs will be available in 2.8-, 3.0-, 3.2-, and 3.4-GHz speed grades. In 1000-unit quantities, they will cost $178, $218, $278, and $417 each, respectively.
Intel Corp.www.intel.com