Intel Pentium 4 Extremely Expensive Edition to ship Monday

Intel will finally ship its extremely expensive Pentium 4 Extreme Edition on Monday, more than a month after the games-oriented processor was announced.

So says PC World, citing a source "familiar with Intel's plans". This 'deep throat' also claims a number of PC vendors will on Monday announce boxes based on the chip.

The P4EE was launched last September at Intel Developer Forum, primarily in an attempt to knock some of the shine off AMD's Athlon 64 launch, which took place the week after.

Like the Athlon 64 FX-51, the P4EE is being pitched as a high performance CPU for gamers. Like the AMD chip, the Intel part is essentially a server/workstation chip - Xeon in this case - re-branded as a desktop processor.

The P4EE boasts 2MB of on-die L3 cache alongside the regular P4's 512KB of L2 cache. It will be clocked at 3.2GHz. Not coincidentally, that's the speed at which the next generation of P4, 'Prescott', is expected to debut. Not only is the P4EE a foil for the Athlon 64 FX, it's also a distraction from the problems Intel denies it's experiencing in getting Prescott out of the door in volume.

The new chip isn't going to be cheap, either. Its anticipated price is $925 - over $500 more expensive than the $417 3.2GHz P4. ®

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