At the transition to a 90nm manufacturing process, something that would be a long down period for Intel started and the cause - heat. For several years it struggled with refining its manufacturing process to be able to increase the frequencies of the Prescott core. The goal was to release a processor at 4GHz, but this turned out to be too much. Intel has for the last year been working on setting their factories to use 65nm technology and it has according to information we've received already reached a productivity equal to the already refined 90nm process.
Intel launches its 900 series to replace the 800 series processors. This time we're talking dual cores, which with the help of the 65nm manufacturing process has reached higher frequencies. With the flagship it has removed all limitations by increasing the processor bus to 1066FSB, left the multipliers unlocked and last but not least activated HyperThreading on both cores. The name of this beast is of course Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955, simply 955XE
Let's take a closer look.
