Price Guides, May 2005: Processors

Intel Pentium 4

Last guide, we were impressed that Intel managed to release their “ Prescott 2M” Pentium 4 [RTPE: “Pentium 4” 2MB] processors ahead of schedule. Intel CPU pricing is fairly stringently controlled, and so after the initial fluctuations while shipments were coming in, prices have pretty much leveled out at where they will remain until the next pre-determined price cuts. A new Prescott 2M, clocking at 3.8GHz, is also in Intel’s near future. We are under NDA for those sorts of topics, but in completely unrelated news, May 26 th looks like it will be a wonderful day for a picnic.


For those of us not ready to move up to the larger cached chips, Intel is still breathing life into the 5xx series with some new SKU announcements. Several months ago, all Pentium 4 5xx ( Prescott) processors received a revision bump as Intel enabled XD protection on their chips. These new processors received the “J” suffix although most merchants didn’t really differentiate the “J” processors from their non-XD predecessors. Sometime this month, Intel will start shipping the XD processor successors, which end in a “1”. These new processors are identical to the “J” revisions, but now also have EM64T. For those of you following at home, you may recall that EM64T instructions are already on the Prescott core, and enabling the extensions doesn’t require any new fabrication techniques on Intel’s behalf. Expect the “5x1” processors to replace the “5x0” processors quickly.


The 3.4GHz Pentium 4 550s are the most popular Pentium on the market right now, but prices aren’t moving:

Intel Pentium 4 (775) 550 800FSB 1MB

To hint a little bit at the upcoming Intel schedule, sometime in Q4 this year, the higher echelon Prescott 2M processors will also receive a similar revision bump. All of the 6xx chips already have EM64T, but Intel’s virtualization instructions – VT – are not present yet. Processors with VT will end in a “2” in their product name.

The dual core “ Smithfield” Pentium D processors are starting to show up for preorder on several vendors. Pricing seems extremely competitive, but we will have more details once the chips are actually available.