Page 1 - A 3200 MHz Introduction

It was December I think that we tested Intel's last processor. It's about time for a new one eh ? Well let's start then, recently Chipzilla Intel released the Pentium 4 C class processors. Today we are taking the 3.2 GHz model for a test-drive. 

The big advantage of this processor is not only that it's ~200 MHZ faster than it's predecessor at 3 GHz, no the big advantage is a new Front Side Bus speed of 800 MHz (actually quad pumped 4x200 MHz). Now that we have such an FSB we can do more with our system's hardware and combine rig of ours with Dual Channel DDR memory at 400 MHz. Why is this so important ? The processors with 800MHz FSB offers a theoretical total of 6.4 GB/s of memory bandwidth) and if you have a mainboard to support it you will have the most fastest consumer solution to date. Of course the recently introduced Hyper-threading technology has now gone mainstream also.

Intel Confidential Laser etched onto the chip just means that this is an engineering sample

Hyper-Threading  is a very innovative technology that basically makes a single 'normal' processor appear as two "logical" processors. It does this by adding a certain two-way aproach in the core, therefore splitting the CPU's resources managed by the operating system. According to Intel, this results in a performance increase in applications that are designed and implemented to take advantage of multi-threading, as well as applications using otherwise-idle CPU resources.