In our review of the Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHz Extreme Edition, we mentioned that it was an unlocked engineer copy. We surely hope that the ‘real’ P4 EEs will be unlocked as well, as this is a CPU for the enthusiast market.
We do not have any information about regarding this, however, a piece of very interesting information about Intel’s arch-rival AMD’s enthusiast processor Athlon 64 FX and its multiplier is at hand.
In a Weblog at Anandtech.com, this could be read from Anand himself:
“It seems as if the Athlon 64 is shipping with its multiplier locked (how difficult/possible it is to unlock, we will have to wait and see), while the Athlon 64 FX ships with an unlocked multiplier. This unlocked multiplier is actually the number one request I received when I posted about the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, so it’s interesting that AMD would actually have the foresight to include such a feature without first being asked – AMD may not have lost touch with the community after all.”
After a bit of researching, we found similar information in Aceshardware’s Athlon 64 review were it promised a new article with more overclocking information concerning the processor.
This is highly positive news, and if it is true we really hope that Intel will catch on and launch its processors unlocked for several years ahead.
Read more at Anandtech.com.
