Pricing, Overclocking, and the Future

Pricing

Let’s start with the easiest newcomer. All of Intel’s Pentium 4 Extreme Edition chips have debuted at $999 and this one is no exception. But like any other rare commodity, demand usually sets the final price and it’s not uncommon to see Extreme Edition processors selling for $1,100 or more online. Buy one if you must.

The new 600-series models are a little more interesting. Prices range from $605 for the 3.6GHz 660 down to $224 for the 3GHz 630. In comparison, Intel currently lists its 3GHz 530J at $178 and the 3.6GHz 560J at $417. Clearly, there’s a significant price to be paid for all of the 600-series’ features, but the final product fares better against its competition.

Overclocking

Now that Intel’s 90nm manufacturing process has had time to mature, we’re hardly surprised to see it demonstrate superior flexibility. Thinking that the process would be good to about 4GHz, we set our ABIT AA8XE to run with a 225MHz bus and a x18 multiplier. After running for a while with solid stability, we started shooting higher, eventually settling on a 245MHz bus speed and a x17 multiplier, resulting in 4.16GHz from the 3.6GHz 660.

At that speed, we saw Doom 3 frame rates jump from 91.3 to 102.8, the 3DMark05 processor score hit 6245 (from 5306), and our WME 9 session drop from 6:04 to five minutes and fourteen seconds. Even Sandra’s memory bandwidth numbers exceeded the results gleaned from our Extreme Edition cruising along on a 1066MHz bus.

And here’s an idea that smacked us cold in the face after trying to find a compromise between core and bus frequencies. Since the only differences between the standard 6-series and Extreme Edition are now clock speed and bus performance, what’s to stop you from buying a 3GHz Pentium 4 630 at just over $200and running it on a 1066MHz bus, yielding a nice, even 4GHz? Providing that retail 3GHz chips prove up to the task, it’d even be possible to drop the multiplier from 15 to 14 and wind up with an actual 3.73GHz Extreme Edition for a fifth of the price. The theory pans out nicely on our lab’s engineering sample chips, but we’ll wait for boxed product to show as well before passing judgment.

The Future

Though the 600-series introduction might look like Intel’s planned course of action for the Pentium 4’s future, we can’t help but to think that it’s really only a stop-gap measure until dual-core processors emerge mid-way through this year. The company has publicly stated that dual-core desktop chips will lead off, followed by server and workstation offerings in 2006, and then mobile processors later that year.

Unfortunately for those who would rather wait, it sounds like Intel will need another chipset in order to make dual-core happen, necessitating a more involved upgrade path. Of course, Intel’s response is that the next chipset will be properly optimized to leverage the throughput demands of multi-processing. More than likely, however, there are other issues through which Intel still needs to work.