After AMD planted themselves firmly atop the performance charts with the Athlon 64 4000+ and Athlon 64 FX-55 processors, the hardware community was interested to see if Intel could quickly field a candidate to challenge the new leader. After Intel decided larger cache P4s and dual-core chips were the way to go, the near-term toppling of AMD seemed less likely. This left Intel’s P4 Extreme Edition CPU as the only serious challenger to the crown. Sunday saw the unveiling of Intel’s P4 EE 3.46GHz that features a 66MHz clock speed bump along with a move to the 1066MHz FSB.

Why a Sunday launch? For years, the White House uses Friday afternoon for „document dumping” — hoping the documents would receive less scrutiny when the public in involved in weekend exploits. Today’s P4 EE 3.46GHz launch comes on a day when Halloween and Tuesday’s US Presidential election is on most people’s minds. Is Intel trying to sneak out a lackluster launch? It sure looks so. (And keep in mind that Intel’s launch of Prescott came on Super Bowl Sunday, and we all know how well that launch went. -Ken)

In performance testing, the P4 EE 3.46GHz chip only provides a slight performance increase over its 3.4GHz predecessor. The chip is still smacked silly by the Athlon 64 4000+ and FX-55 in most applications, and many times, fails to keep pace with the Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz) Prescott core chip. In the end, the P4 EE 3.46GHz chip offers little to the hardware enthusiast other than allowing them to brag over owning a US$999 MSRP processor that underperforms. Intel enthusiasts would be better saving nearly US$500 and opting for the P4 560 3.6GHz processor instead. The only bright spot in today’s release may be the launch of the 925XE chipset which, with its 1066MHz FSB, may allow for spectacular overclocking of lower speed Prescott P4 processors, provided you have enough liquid nitrogen on-hand.

10/31/2004