IT FELT A BIT LIKE doing business with Jeffrey Archer: picking up a package from a guy in a suit on a platform in Paddington station. But since there's only one Hyperthreading Pentium 4 Extreme Edition chip in the country, it seemed worth the risk. The chip that Lou "pants on fire" Burns had never heard of until some form of divine intervention struck him on the way to addressing the amassed faithful at IDF, looks like a regular 0.13µ Northwood core P4 with a few extra components welded to its underside. It'll slip into any i865 or 875-based mobo, we learned, and Intel says it tested the chip in "all of them", with no problems. Our sample came with a heatsink aligned to deflect the airflow across the voltage regulator, just in case.
"It's a Xeon, right?" we put to Intel's new UK PR Czar, who simply looked to the heavens for dose of Burns-style inspiration. It's a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition," he said. Package in hand, we took the chip to the subterranean testing facility run by our new buddies over at Custom PC. The guys there had been testing 64-bit Athlons for the past month, so we figured it'd be interesting to stick the P4EE into their test rig and get some benchmarks enabling us to compare the two chips. It's unlocked, we warned the spods, "Try not to blow it up." They just grinned.
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News source: The Inq
