Socket 478: July 2001 To March 2004, Continued
With the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz, Hyper-Threading was introduced, bringing about the ultimate end of Rambus.
The FSB800 (QDR, real 200 MHz) was introduced together with the chipsets 875 (Canterwood) and 865 (Springdale). Support for dual-channel DDR400 memory made it possible to reach a memory bandwidth of up to 5 GB/s!
This memory technology made the Pentium 4 more popular than ever, and the first motherboards sold for around $350 and more.
Abit built the BH7, which also offered a 200 MHz FSB on a 845D chipset.
Two days before the launch of the Athlon 64 FX from AMD, Intel was forced by the superiority of its competitor to dig deep into its bag of tricks: the Xeon with Prestonia core (later with Gallatin-Core) available on the server market was immediately brought into the desktop market in Socket 478 as a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. The particular feature of this CPU is the additional 2 MB L3 cache. To date, the CPU costs around $1000. In spite of this, it had nothing with which to counter the Athlon 64 FX. The lightning strike later turned out to be a disappointment. Customers decided to stick with the cheaper and more powerful Athlon 64 CPUs.
The early switch to 90 nm technology caused several problems. The new Pentium 4 with Prescott core has a 1 MB L2 cache and an SSE3 command set, but with its hardly notable performance increase and sharply augmented heat loss, it is unimpressive. It is primarily the design that causes Intel so many problems with heat loss.
