Intel Pentium D 820 2.8 GHz

Jan 11, 2009

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. WeĆ¢€™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