Concept

Pentium D

Summary
Pentium D is a range of desktop 64-bit x86-64 processors based on the NetBurst microarchitecture, which is the dual-core variant of the Pentium 4 manufactured by Intel. Each CPU comprised two cores. The brand's first processor, codenamed Smithfield and manufactured on the 90 nm process, was released on May 25, 2005, followed by the 65 nm Presler nine months later. The core implementation on the 90 nm "Smithfield" and later 65 nm "Presler" are designed differently but are functionally the same. The 90 nm "Smithfield" contains a single die, with two adjoined but functionally separate CPU cores cut from the same wafer. The later 65 nm "Presler" utilized a multi-chip module package, where two discrete dies each containing a single core reside on the CPU substrate. Neither the 90nm "Smithfield" nor the 65 nm "Presler" were capable of direct core to core communication, relying instead on the northbridge link to send information between the 2 cores. By 2004, the NetBurst processors reached a clock speed barrier at 3.8 GHz due to a thermal (and power) limit exemplified by the Presler's 130 watt thermal design power (a higher TDP requires additional cooling that can be prohibitively noisy or expensive). The future belonged to more energy efficient and slower clocked dual-core CPUs on a single die instead of two. However, the Pentium D did not offer significant upgrades in design, still resulting in relatively high power consumption. The final shipment date of the dual die Presler chips was August 8, 2008, which marked the end of the Pentium D brand and also the NetBurst microarchitecture. The Pentium D line was removed from the official price lists on July 13, 2010. The dual-core CPU is capable of running multi-threaded applications typical in transcoding of audio and video, compressing, photo and video editing and rendering, and ray-tracing. Single-threaded applications, including most older games, do not benefit much from a second core compared to an equally clocked single-core CPU.
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