A physical look
Let's take a physical look at the 376m transistor-filled Extreme Edition 955.
As is Intel's way, review samples are engineering models without the usual speed and cache etching founds on retail examples. This could be any LGA775 CPU.
The back shows the contact pads and pinless design of all LGA775 models. Note just how busy the central section is?
Here's the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 next to the Extreme Edition 840, on the right. 4MB of L2 cache takes some routing.
Here's the 65nm processor running at rather faster than its 3.46GHz clock speed. The CPU-Z shot highlights the excellent overclockability of the '955 sample and the multiplier-unlocked nature of all Extreme Edition CPUs.
Windows XP sees a total of 4 cores. Applications that are multi-threaded in nature benefit massively from the parallel processing power afforded by dual core CPUs, so expect to see some big numbers in our benchmark section.
