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Intel Ships Five 64-bit Pentium 4s
Intel is shipping five 64-bit Pentium 4 processors for use in desktop computers. The release comes on the heels of the company’s shipment earlier this month of early production versions of its dual-core CPUs
(See “Dual-Core Pentiums Coming In Q2”.)
The five new CPUs all provide 64-bit memory addressing through Intel’s Extended Memory 64 Technology (EM64T). Intel officials also said that later this year the company will ship EM64T versions of every newly introduced Intel desktop processor, including the Celeron D processor line.
All five also support Intel’s Hyper-Threading (HT) technology. Introduced three years ago, HT enables a single core processor to run two separate independent threads, basically appearing as two logical processors.
One of the new chips now shipping is dubbed the Pentium 4 Processor Extreme Edition 3.73 GHz. The other four new processors are members of the Intel Pentium 4 Processor 6xx CPU series.
All five are targeted at both IT users and consumers, the company said in a published statement. They will all be able to run Microsoft’s Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, a 64-bit operating system that is currently in the Release Candidate testing stage.
The Extreme Edition 3.73 GHz CPU features a fast 1066 MHz system bus and 2MB of L2 cache, and costs $999 in quantities of 1,000. The new 6xx CPUs range in speed from 3 GHz up to 3.60 GHz, feature an 800 MHz system bus and a 2MB L2 cache, and cost between $224 and $605.
About the Author
Stuart J. Johnston has covered technology, especially Microsoft, since February 1988 for InfoWorld, Computerworld, Information Week, and PC World, as well as for Enterprise Developer, XML & Web Services, and .NET magazines.