Is Intel's New "Extreme" Chip A Halloween Horror?

Intel Corp. quietly pushed its processor bus speed above 1-GHz on Halloween with a new release of its Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor.
However, tests showed that the new 3.46-GHz Pentium 4 EE chip has slipped in performance relative to its chief competitor from Advanced Micro Devices. The real fright? Intel's new chip is priced at $999, $172 more than AMD's rival, the Athlon FX-55.
Intel's stated goal for the new release is to bring a "balanced" approach to home PCs, bringing the performance of the processor, chipset, and memory closer together and eliminating bottlenecks.

"PC enthusiasts are enjoying more rich media and gaming content than ever as the PC becomes central to the digital home," said Bill Siu, Intel vice president and general manager of its desktop platforms group, in a statement. "The new 925XE Express chipset, combined with the Intel Pentium 4 processor Extreme Edition, is another example of the platform approach we're moving toward – bringing chipsets, processors and other components together to provide specific benefits to PC buyers."

But tests by ExtremeTech analysts showed that the Pentium 4 EE, typically faster than the AMD Athlon FX series in applications like media encoding, has now been usurped. Moreover, the AMD FX-55 is priced at $827 each in 1,000-unit lots, offering superior performance at a cheaper price.

For both AMD and Intel, however, the FX series and the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition are the premier brand of each processor series. While both chips are marketed to gamers, the vast majority of components sold by both companies are of the more vanilla Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 varities. On the other hand, what Intel and AMD add to their premier lines often reveal the next enhancements to their mainstream products.