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The Pentium D Processor
The Pentium D Lineup Though we have already reviewed the first dual core Intel processor a while back in our Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 review, the real story may be these little puppies we are looking at today. The Pentium D processor line is based on the same core as the Pentium Extreme Edition, the Smithfield core. The Smithfield core is essentially two Prescott cores stuck together on a single chip. No other major architectural differences exist, except that the Pentium D line does not have HyperThreading on it. Unlike the Extreme Edition 800 series which can have a total of four logical cores (two physical cores with two logical, HyperThreading cores each) the Pentium D is strictly two single threaded cores. The advantages of having a true dual core processor over a single core, HyperThreading processor are fairly noticeable and users should see a good sized increase in performance going from a HyperThreaded CPU to a dual core CPU in benchmarks and applications that take advantage of multiple processing threads. We’ll see this illustrated in several of the coming benchmarks. As for the official specifications of the Pentium D line, we have as follows: Two full Prescott cores,
- Netburst Architecture
- 800 MHz Front-side
- Bbus 2 x 1 MB L2
- Cache EM64T 64-bit
- Support Execute Disable Bitmn