The Athlon II X2 & Phenom II X2: 45nm Dual-Core from AMD

A Blast from the Past: The Pentium 4 660 and the Pentium Extreme Edition 955

Two weeks ago I asked everyone what older CPUs they’d like to see included in one of our quietly introduced features on AnandTech: Bench.  I got requests for everything from original Pentium processors to VIA’s Nano.  While I’m working on adding additional data to the tool I just finished testing two older CPUs over the weekend that I thought would be useful in this review: the Pentium 4 660 and the Pentium Extreme Edition 955.

Pentium Extreme Edition 955 (left) and Pentium 4 660 (right)

Both of these CPUs are from 2005.  The Pentium 4 660 was a single-core processor based on Intel’s infamous Prescott core.  The processor had a 2MB L2 cache and Hyper Threading support; it ran at 3.6GHz, a higher clock speed than any current AMD or Intel processor.

The Pentium EE 955 is based on two separate Intel 65nm Presler cores on one package (ah, remember the early days of dual-core?).  The 955 ran at 3.46GHz but had HT enabled, allowing it to execute 4 threads at the same time.

Pentium Extreme Edition 955 (left) and Pentium 4 660 (right)

When the Pentium 660 debuted it cost $605, while the Pentium EE 955 would set you back $999 in 2005.  These were some of the fastest Pentium 4s ever released and you’ll see them compared to a couple of ~$90 CPUs here today.

The Test