Com-Central.net

To understand Presler, you first have to know about another Intel CPU: Cedar Mill. Cedar Mill is also a 65nm CPU, also based on Prescott. Note that the actual gate widths are as small as 35nm, which gives you some idea of how tight things are getting with these sub-micron process technologies. Internally, Cedar Mill has 2MB of L2 cache, just like the Pentium 4 600 series CPUs, and contains 188 million transistors. Cedar Mill will eventually supplant the high end of the Prescott line, although final product names and clock rates aren't known yet. Cedar Mill is built using Intel's P1264 65nm process, which has been churning out both Cedar Mill and Yonah CPUs in the past couple of months.

So, what's Presler, then? Presler is two Cedar Mill CPU dies built onto a single CPU package, and shipped as a dual-core CPU. Some pundits have accused Intel of cheating, but from the user perspective, Presler is just another dual-core processor, and satisfies the same software licensing as any dual-core CPU. So Windows XP supports Presler as a dual-core CPU, which means you can theoretically (though not practically) have two Preslers running under a single Windows XP Pro license.

Since Presler is just two Cedar Mill CPUs, the transistor count is simply double at 376 million. The two dies share a single front-side bus, which is clocked at 266MHz. Since the FSB is quad-pumped, that gives the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 an effective FSB clock of 1066MHz, or 266MHz higher than the Pentium Extreme Edition 840. The CPU runs at a clock multiplier of 13x, which yields a clock speed of 3.46GHz. The 955 offers potentially significant improvement over the 840 Extreme Edition, with double the L2 cache, a higher FSB speed and a higher clock speed.