Today Intel launched the Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 955. Due to hit retail on January, 16th for $999.00, this CPU sports two physical cores and Hyper Threading for another two virtual cores. The first (p)reviews can be found on:
Viperlair: The Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 is a dual core processor clocked at 3.46GHz built on the 65nm fab process. This is a small 260MHz bump from their Extreme Edition 840 that can be attributed to the bump in FSB. Previous dual core CPUs ran at 800FSB, but the newest is now riding a 1066FSB, erm, bus. So, while the small clock speed increase may not seem like much, the faster FSB should yield an improvement, especially in memory intensive applications. The L2 caches is made up of 2MB per core, bringing a total of 4MB to the CPU. This is essentially a doubling of the cache introduced with the EE 840 and should positively affect business application performance.

Bit-Tech: In our second Multi-Tasking test, the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 was not too far behind the Athlon 64 X2 4800+. The single cored Athlon 64 processors ground to a halt and we found it very hard to control DVD Shrink - we ended up having to end the process, rather than close the program in the normal fashion. We also experienced hitching inside Far Cry, more so than when the virus scanner was running in the background. In short, don't try and play games while encoding a DVD on a single cored Athlon 64 processor, you will not have a pleasurable gaming experience, no matter how fast your single cored CPU is.

Hexus: Being critical, the Intel Extreme Edition runs a little hotter than we'd like and should have shipped with a default clock speed of at least 3.73GHz, giving better out-of-the-box performance. The days of performance, single-core CPUs are numbered, even for gamers, with the likes of ATI and NVIDIA investing in multi-CPU driver support that makes better use of the parallel power on tap. The Intel Extreme Edition 955 is a mighty fast, overclockable CPU that's out of the reach for most punters. Official release date for the E.E 955 is slated for mid-January 2006 along with cheaper models that will undoubtedly cut core speed and features (Hyper-Threading) with each model a rung down the pricing ladder. What'll be interesting to note is how quickly Intel is able to release slower, cheaper models into the retail domain. A 3GHz dual-core CPU for L200 sounds just about right. Will you oblige, Intel?

Xbitlabs: Besides higher performance, the new Presler core of the dual-core Intel CPUs can also boast very high overclocking potential. We managed to reach 4.26GHz clock speed on Pentium Extreme Edition 955 easily without any additional cooling involved. And the experiments carried out by some hardware enthusiasts proved that even 5.5GHz is not the maximum for the new Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 on the Presler core. So, you can speed it up quite tangibly by simply overclocking to higher frequency.

Legitreviews: Now entering 2006 we have a new processor coming out that is able to overclock to roughly 4.8GHz on the reference Intel board and with a $200 water cooler that anyone can buy and install in under twenty minutes. While Intel has kept their mouth shut on how well they expect these new 9XX series to scale we think they know and it is high. Maybe in 2006 we will see 5GHz if we are lucky and in all honesty 5GHz shouldn't be hard on these if the retail processors perform any where close to how our test sample did.

HotHardware: The Pentium Extreme Edition 955 processor performed well overall throughout our entire battery of benchmarks. Due to the processor's relatively high-clock speed, dual execution cores, HT technology and 1066MHz bus, the synthetic benchmarks, 3D rendering tests, and audio encoding tests ran best on the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 / D975XBX platform. However, most of the gaming tests, content creation and desktop applications, and the video encoding tests ran best on the AMD Athlon 64 X2 / NF4 SLIX16 combo.