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When it comes to describing the power draw and thermal output of any processor, very often, different metrics are used. One metric is based on simultaneous full-power utilization of every single transistor within the processor. A more reality-oriented metric is a typical power consumption under what can be considered full load, based on what could be expected in a typical multitasking workload which has to be lower than a straight multiplication of ICC_Max x VCC_Max, meaning highest current multiplied by the highest voltage to obtain the highest theoretical wattage.

In the case of the P4EE, the latter number would be 72.3A at 1.425V or 103W, however, TDP or the highest possible power draw that any consumer would ever encounter is 93.9W. Keep in mind that TDP is somewhat arbitrarily defined but that it is a valid metric used by both AMD and Intel in order to provide a guideline for OEM manufacturers. There is no doubt, though, that the P4EE is a King Kong processor with a Chipzilla hunger for power. It is interesting here to note that there are different versions of the P4EE, specked for VCC max 1.350, 1.375 or 1.4V respectively, with different voltage ID's (VID) from 1.475 to 1.525V. There is no information at this point regarding the ratio between the different versions, most likely, the bulk will run at the higher voltages.

P4EE, left vs. P4 3.2, right. Note that is not just a few added capacitors but that the entire floor plan has changed, the P4 (Northwood) supports a 20 unit matrix, the P4EE matrix is 5 x 6.

Form Factor

A major criticism of Intel and their model politics has been the transition between different interfaces, that is from Socket7 to Slot1 and then Socket370 followed by the Socket 423 to Socket 478, which caused some major grief with the community of early P4 adaptors and finally the pin non-compatible Xeon processors in the Socket 603. The P4EE does not face this problem in that it conforms to the standard Northwood form factor using 478 pins. On the top, it is impossible to tell any differences under the heat spreader anyway (aside from the markings), leaving the bottom of the CPU as the only discriminating factor.

Compared to its avuncular relative, that is, the P4 3.2, in a nutshell, there are a few extra capacitors at the bottom of the packaging, that is, in the center sparing between the pins. It appears as if the extra caps serve decoupling in addition to smoothing out some left-over ripples, however, all we can say at this point is that the bottom SMT components provide unmistakable landmarks for the identification of any -EE processor compared to any standard Northwood core based CPU.

Since there are no further technical details, we'll jump right into the benchmarks, after a short intermission in form of the system configuration disclosure and the processor specs at one glance.

next page:    => At One Glance =>

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