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After the surprise launch of AMD's Athlon XP 2400 / 2600 last week, Intel counters with some new definitions in destop processor speed grades. Quantispeed or not, at 2.8GHz, the latest P4 is already dead serious but what happens if this beast is overclocked another roughly 10%? More than we can say in a single sentence, that's for sure.

Last week, we witnessed the surprise launch of the latest AMD Athlon 2400+ and 2600+ processors based on the Thoroughbred "B" core and for a few brief days, AMD had gained back at least a shot at the title of having the fastest x-86 processor on the market. Meanwhile, the next generation of Intel's Pentium4 processor was already waiting at the gates for today's launch date, enter the Pentium4 2.8 GHz.

Another speed grade is just another speed grade but despite the fact that there were no official changes announced, the number of translation lookaside buffers has doubled from 64 to 128. For raw performance in single application benchmarks, this is probably negligible, however, in multitasking and / or multithreading applications where the TLBs act similar to a tag cache for the virtual memory space assigned by the OS to any given application, the additional TLB space will certainly come in handy.

We have run Pentium4 processors before at 2.8 GHz, the 2.53 GHz version did not have too much problem running at that speed, even with only minor increases in core voltage and standard air cooling using the all- aluminum HSF usually provided by Intel with their CPUs. Using standard air cooling, however, the 2.53 GHz CPU usually maxed out around 2850 MHz. When we received the new 2.8 GHz processor we were wondering whether there was anything new aside from the new name or could it be that Intel merely capitalized on the known capabilities of the older speed grade? Therefore, the obvious question we were asking ourselves was whether we would be looking at a new speed grade achieved by higher Vre and requiring better cooling et cetera or whether we would actually get a processor specked at 2.8 GHz with enough overhead to qualify as a real new speed grade.

Meeting the specs and specs only without headroom would be somewhat atypical for Intel, however, in today's bloody competition, everything is possible. For us, the test was actually more of the simple kind, that is, all we needed to do was to take the processor and overclock it using no more than 1.6 Vre. Granted, 1.6V is our own arbitrarily defined threshold of what we consider a minor voltage bump without going into anything insane here.

Of course, the situation is not as simple as that, after all, we heard reports only a few days ago that standard mainboards would not be able to drive P4 processors above 3.0 GHz in that the power demand beyond 3.0 GHz would exceed the capabilities of most mainboards. That is, voltage regulators of mainboards specked to run the P4 at or above 3.0 GHz would have to be able to supply 70 W to the CPU, whereas for the sub 3GHz systems 60W would suffice. Again, there is a simple way to find out, shall we....

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