Posted on Thursday, September 18 2003 @ 11:27 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck| I did some thinking about it - this is the king of all overclockers' CPUs! For instance, if you Peltier or vapor-chill or kryocool your P4 Extreme Edition to the extreme, but the mainboard FSB cannot keep up (dang, it stops at 1.1 GHz! - angry geek face appears), this humongous cache helps buffer the effects of having to rely on maximum multiplier value where the FSB and memory is way, way slower than the CPU. So, the real application performance scaling curve can continue a bit further upwards.
Since the die now gets dominated by a large cache area, it will be interesting to monitor where the thermal "hot-spots" on the die will be now, and whether that will affect overclockability. Also, will P4 EE need bigger/faster/noisier fans? Finally, it seems to be that this will ultimately be a very successful product, which may spawn a whole "new" long-term product line, possibly repackaging the XeonMP versions of the each new-generation CPU into the high-end desktop like at higher clocks and faster FSB to create ultimate enthusiast processors. So, a year or so from now, you may have a, say, "Pentium 5 Extreme Edition" (again a pure speculation or time machine garbage) in a Prescott Socket T or whatever, basically a repackaged Potomac XeonMP CPU with 1 MB L2 and 4 MB L3 cache, possibly a 1066 MHz FSB throughput! |
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The Inquirer suggests that this could be an excellent strategy. These Extreme Edition Pentium 4's would be repacked XeonMP CPUs, so much of the development costs would be recovered. It would also help Intel to keep their desktop performance crown.
Source : The Inquirer
