Pentium 4 600 series arriving soon....

Pentium 4 600 series to arrive next week

Some performance figures emerge

By Fuad Abazovic: Friday 18 February 2005, 10:32

WE REPORTED yesterday about Intel's new 64 bit Extreme Extreme Edition and we managed to find out that many members of its 6xx series are due to arrive very soon. The 600 series will feature 2MB cache and some other nice features.
As for performance, we saw that the Pentium 4 570J clocked at 3.8GHz is beating or being very close to the new Pentium 4 3.73 GHz Extreme Edition in most cases. We checked quite a few numbers and we've barely seen any example where the 3.73GHz was faster for applications. So the jury is out on how much the 2MB of cache powered with a 1066MHz front side bus helps.

As for the Pentium 4 660, this fellow clocks at 3.6GHz and when powered with 2MB of cache is marginally faster than the Pentium 4 560 clocked at 3.6GHz but powered with 1MB of cache. In some cases these chips tie, as the performance increase from between 560 and 660 chips is marginal, roughly two to five per cent.

Faster clocked chips based on the same marchitecture should mean faster performance. That's what the now long over MHz wars were based on. One key question is how fast the 600s perform against the Athlon FX and 64 series. No doubt reviewers are sharpening their quill pens right now.

The new chips, as we've reported before, feature EM64T, Intel's 64 bit support, and also execute bit disabled marchitecture. Enhanced Speedstep will be supported too.

The soon to be current 600 series works at 800MHz for the system bus, while the Extreme Edition works at 1066 MHz. Intel will introduce 3.2GHz, 3.4GHz and 3.6GHz as the fastest member of the 2MB, 64 bit family while its brand new 3.8GHz with 2MB cache and all these nice features is scheduled to come later in the year. µ

Source: The inquirer (www.theinquirer.net)