As the world waits with bated breath for Intel's upcoming "Prescott" series of Pentium 4 processors, set to launch next week, many have already considered Intel's current "Northwood" processor architecture all but retired. The Pentium 4 has been stalled at 3.2 GHz clock rate for the past six months, and Intel even moved to a different processor architecture, "Gallatin" for their high-end Extreme Edition processor. Surprisingly though, the Northwood processor core remains alive and kicking. Today we're looking at the fastest Intel processor has yet to release, and surprise, it's based on Northwood.

Releasing a new Pentium 4 processor based on their current Northwood processor design isn't an incredibly surprising move, as it's been proven by a lot of users out there that there is still quite a lot of life left in this architecture. Typical 3.0 and 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 processors based on the latest Northwood processor cores have been able to hit in upwards of 3.4-3.6 clock speeds with proper cooling, which shows us that Intel's 0.13-micron yields may be better than many realize.



Link: GamePC