Intel's dual-core processor improves

PC World - Intel Corp.'s new dual-core 3.2-GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 840 processor made a good showing on PC World's WorldBench 5 tests in key multimedia and multitasking tests. But users looking for improvements in single-threaded applications, such as most office applications and games, will see little benefit from the new chip.

The P4 EE 840 will be the first chip available with the dual-core architecture from Intel; it will use motherboards with the forthcoming 945 chip set. Other dual-core desktop processors from the company's Pentium D line will come later this spring

Systems with the P4 EE 840 will be on sale in a few weeks, say some system vendors. Dell Inc. has been one of the more forthcoming with its plans and says the chip will first appear in its Dell Dimension XPS Gen5 gaming PCs in the coming weeks. Pricing for those systems hasn't yet been announced.

As the name implies, dual-core processors incorporate two physical processors and L2 caches into one piece of silicon, acting, in theory, like systems that have two processors. The P4 EE 840 goes one step further by including Intel's Hyper-Threading technology in each core, which brings you another, "virtual" second processor per core.

Like Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Athlon 64 chips, the newly released 3.73-GHz P4 EE and the new 3-GHz to 3.6-GHz Pentium 4s with EM64T, the dual-core CPU has 64-bit support. The new chip's cores each have 1MB of L2 cache, and the supporting chip set runs with either a 800-MHz front-side bus (FSB) or a 1,066-MHz FSB (the P4 EE 840 supports an 800-MHz FSB).

Shows its prowess

PC World tested a preproduction reference system from Intel with engineering samples of the new processor and the 955X Express chip set, 1GB of DDR2-667 memory, a 160GB hard disk and a Sapphire Radeon 850XT graphics card. The system, which was running Windows XP Professional, earned a WorldBench 5 score of 95. That score puts it a little above a previously tested 3.4-GHz P4 550 system, which had a score of 91, and slightly below the 98 average score of four previously tested 2.2-GHz Athlon 64 3400+ PCs.

The new system truly showed its mettle, however, in certain applications within WorldBench 5 -- namely the Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator, Windows Media Encoder and our multitasking test. It was most impressive in the Windows Media Encoder test, where it shaved 2 minutes off the 3.4-GHz P4 system's time of 7 minutes, 41 seconds, and it was 15 seconds faster than a top-scoring Athlon

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