Extreme exhilaration. Extreme enjoyment.

Whether it's gaming, digital photography, or video editing, today's high-impact entertainment demands breakthrough technology. Get the unrivaled multi-core performance of the new Intel® Core™2 Extreme processors.

Intel® Core™2 Extreme quad-core processor
When more is better—with four processing cores the Intel® Core™2 Extreme quad-core processor QX6850 is a multitasking monster delivering significantly more performance for highly-threaded apps.

* 8 MB of L2 cache
* 1333 MHz front-side bus


Fast Radix-16 divider: One key new technology Intel has incorporated into Penryn is their Fast Radix-16 divider. Intel’s Radix-16 divider is a new divider technique providing double the divider speed over previous processors when handling math computations (both floating-point and integer operations): 4-bits processed per cycle in Penryn versus 2-bits per cycle in today’s processors.

SSE4: Penryn will also support Intel’s new SSE4 instruction set. The majority of the new instructions are focused on compiler optimizations, but Intel has also added a number of “application targeted accelerators” which are hard-coded onto the processor’s die to improve performance in gaming, video encoding, 3D rendering, and photo imaging apps (provided that the software has been coded to use the new instructions of course).

Super Shuffle Engine: Penryn incorporates a 128-bit wide, single-pass shuffle unit. This allows it to perform full-width shuffles in a single cycle. The new shuffle unit will also improve Penryn’s performance with SSE2, SSE3, and SSE4 instructions that have shuffle-like operations.

Improved Virtualization: Penryn also features Intel’s enhanced virtualization technology. Intel claims virtual machine transition times have been improved from 25-75% with Penryn.

Larger L2 cache: Penryn processors will feature a considerably larger, more associative L2 cache. Dual-core Penryn CPUs will ship with up to 6MB of L2 cache while quad-core processors will contain up to 12MB of L2 cache. In comparison, today’s dual-core Core 2 CPUs ship with 4MB of L2 cache, while quad-core chips contain 8MB.

These larger caches help improve performance by increasing the probability that each execution core can access data from the processor’s L2 cache rather than having to get it from slower system memory.

Faster Clock Speeds/FSB: Intel’s already bumped the front-side bus (FSB) speed up to 1333MHz; Penryn will crank this up another notch, ultimately scaling all the way up to 1.6GHz. Penryn CPUs will also boast higher clock speeds. Speeds of 3.0GHz and up are expected.

Here are the specs on the Core 2 Extreme QX9650:
# 1333MHz FSB
# 3.0GHz clock speed with four processing cores (quad-core)
# 12MB L2 cache (2x6MB)
# 45nm high-K metal gate transistor technology
# 214mm2 die size, 820M transistors
# SSE4 instructions
# 130W Thermal Design Power, C-Stepping
# Overspeed protection (clock multiplier) removed
# Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST)
# Intel 64 Technology
# Intel Virtualization Technology (VT)
# Supports Execute Disable Bit (XD)
# LGA-775 socket interface