14 DAY TRIAL // When the dual-core processors appear, a new era will start. AMD has announced its intentions to produce such solutions even since June last year. But, despite the headstart of Advanced Micro Devices, the first dual-core processors will bear Intel's signature.
The combination between the Pentium Extreme Edition 840 CPU and the 955X chipset was taken by many top producers and the trend of adopting the new solutions is rising. The dual-core technology is one step ahead of the Hyper-Threading proposed by Intel, which allows the running of two types of operations in the same time.
The first Intel dual-core processors will be included in the high-end systems like Velocity Micro ProMagix DCX and Dell Dimension XPS Gen 5, both of them already fitted with the Extreme Edition 840 CPU. Each core of the processor benefits from 1MB cache level 2 memory and supports Hyper-Threading, which means that overall, the processor has a 2 MB cache memory support. The CPU will have a front side bus of 800 MHz and will support the new Intel technology Intel 64-bit Extended Memory.
For the first time after 1998, Intel is launching a CPU which is ideal for overclocking. Although the initial frequency of the Extreme Edition 840 processor is 3.2 GHz, which is not impressive, through overclocking, the CPU can surpass the 4 GHz threshold.
Another dual-core model from Intel is the Pentium D, which will have the same 3,2 GHz frequency. Actually, this model is an almost exact replica of the Extreme Edition version, even the number of transistors is the same. The only difference worth mentioning is that Pentium D won't have Hyper-Threading support, so it will only have 2 threads. This processor will be delivered together with the 945 Express chipset.