Intel recently launched its last piece of the Core puzzle through its mobile Core 2 Duo series. But even if the Core architecture is a mighty step forward compared to the Pentium 4 family it seems Intel hasn’t forgotten about the ol’ faithful. Pentium 4 is still being sold and Intel has now tuned its NetBurst architecture further. The power consumption and heat dissipation has been the biggest problems with the architecture and this has now been fixed, more or less. Intel will launch new steppings for its Pentium D 9xx and Pentium 4 6xx processors called D0, upgrading from the current C1 stepping.
Pentium D with its dual processor cores comes with a massive TDP at 130W while the new D0 stepping has a TDP at 95W. An impressive decrease which would’ve been really interesting if it had arrived a year ago when the Pentium family still was Intel’s flagship.
Affected processor models:
Pentium D 9xx: 2.8, 3.0 and 3.4GHz without VT. But also 3.4GHz and 3.6GHz with VT.
The 6xx series with its single-core design has a somewhat lower TDP to start with, “only” 86W, but this will be lowered to 65W with the new D0 stepping.
Affected processor models:
Pentium 4 6xx: 3.0, 3.2, 3.4 and 3.6GHz
Intel has made a remarkable job with NetBurst’s power consumption, alas a bit too late to have any real effect.
