Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition 955: 65nm, 4 threads and 376M transistors

Intel’s move to their 65nm process has gone extremely well. We’ve had 65nm Presler, Cedar Mill and Yonah samples for the past couple of months now and they have been just as good as final, shipping silicon. Just a couple of months ago we previewed Intel’s 65nm Pentium 4 and showcased their reduction in power consumption as well as took an early look at overclocking potential of the chips.

Intel’s 65nm Pentium 4s will be the last Pentium 4s to come out of Santa Clara and while we’d strongly suggest waiting to upgrade until we’ve seen what Conroe will bring us, there are those that can’t wait another six months, and for those that are building or buying systems today we need to find out if Intel’s 65nm Pentium 4 processors are any more worthwhile than the rather disappointing chips we had at 90nm.

The move to 90nm for Intel was highly anticipated but it could not have been any more disappointing from a performance standpoint. In a since abandoned quest for higher clock speeds, Intel brought us Prescott at 90nm with its 31 stage pipeline - up from 20 stages in the previous generation Pentium 4s. Through some extremely clever and effective engineering, Prescott actually wasn’t any slower than its predecessors, despite the increase in pipeline stages. What Prescott did leave us with however was a much higher power bill. Deeply pipelined processors generally consume a lot more power, and Prescott did just that.