Intel Pentium D Processor 820, Pentium 4 Processor 670 and 945 Express Chipsets

Focusing on the enthusiast and high-end workstation markets, Intel started its multi-core desktop campaign last month by introducing the 955X Express chipset and Pentium Processor Extreme Edition dual-core CPU. Today's release is aimed at the mainstream market, though. The new mainstream chipsets are the 945G Express Chipset and 945P Express Chipset (the 'G' variant providing onboard graphics), and the three new mainstream dual-core processors are the Pentium D Processor 820, 830 and 840, which run at 2.8GHz, 3.0GHz and 3.2GHz, respectively. One of the big differences between the Pentium D line and the Pentium Extreme Edition dual-core CPU is that the Pentium D processors do not support Hyper-Threading.

The single core Pentium 4 Processor line is also getting attention today with the release of the Pentium 4 Processor 670, the fastest (at 3.8GHz) and latest in the 600 sequence of processors. This is an 800MHz FSB processor with 2MB L2 cache and Hyper-Threading support.

"Why do we have these two new platforms (945 and 955X)?" you ask. Well, even though Intel's first generation dual-core processors are designed for the current LGA775 socket, they are not compatible with the current LGA775 Intel chipsets -- 915 and 925. Therefore, they are necessary. It is also worth noting that the 945 Express chipsets do not support the aforementioned dual-core Pentium Processor Extreme Edition.

Those of you who are skeptical about the need or usefulness of multiple cores on one processor should know that Intel is working hard to get more application programmers to write or update code so that software will fully take advantage of multi-core CPUs. In this article, I will not spend a lot of time on the multi-threaded type of benchmarks/applications that multi-core processors really like. Instead, I'm going to run through the usual set of benchmarks I use to see what kind of performance we can expect from the 2.8GHz Pentium D 820 and 3.8GHz Pentium 4 670 on the 945G platform.