Intel has announced a new version of the Pentium 4, which it calls “extreme edition”. Initially, it will ship with a clock frequency of 3.2 GHz.
The great improvement is the added 2 MB L3 cache; Pentium 4 already has 512 KB L2 cache. Cache memory has great impact on performance while using some applications – some office applications and even a few games will probably run as much as 10 – 20 % faster on the extreme edition CPU.
The CPU will be launched in about 60 days. Most certainly, the whole thing is meant to disturb the launch of Athlon 64, which takes place in approximately a week from now. The added cache memory might be in order to compensate for the Atlhon 64’s on-die memory controller.
The price is unknown as of yet, but it’ll probably cost you an arm as well as a leg since the die size and transistor count will drastically increase.
Read more at Anandtech here.
