Intel"s new chip for gamers and enthusiasts was officially unveiled by Lou Burns on the big stage here in the San Jose Convention Centre. The chip will sport an extra 2Mb of cache and will start at 3.2GHz. Lou, told his audience of developers and hacks that the chip, named Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, delivers "awesome performance". Burns said Intel had listened to the gaming community and designed the chip with them in mind. He said the chip will be available to buy in the 30-60-day timeframe.
Intel spokesman George Alfs told the INQ the chip would sport a 800MHz frontside bus allied to the 2.5MB L3 of cache in total. He said the company had worked closely with OEMs who build games systems and who really wanted something for gamers. He said the extra cache would improve the performance of the chip significantly, by reducing the need for the processor to go off to memory for data. This combined with the implementation of Hyperthreading in the chip will deliver unparalleled performance. Both Half-Life2 and Doom 3 will implement Hyperthreading enhancements to exploit the technology.