Pricing

First of all I would like to take a look at the price-list. In order to better understand the correct disposition of the Athlon 64 X2 and Pentium D in the today’s market, we need to check out their prices. The official price of the youngest Presler based CPU, Pentium D 920, is $241. Pentium D 930 is priced at $316. The least expensive competitor’s dual-core solution, AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, sells at $301. It means that this processor is most likely to be a direct competitor to Pentium D 930. As for Pentium D 920, it is the today’s cheapest dual-core desktop processor.

Moreover, in the second half of April Intel is planning o lowering the prices of its dual-core CPUs. After that both, Pentium D 920 and Pentium D 930, will drop down to $209. No doubt that AMD will respond to this measure with an inevitable price reduction for its Athlon 64 X2. However, we still believe that Intel will retain the title of the manufacturer of the world’s most affordable dual-core processors.

Closer Look at Pentium D 920 and Pentium D 930

Pentium D 920 and Pentium D 930 feature a pretty typical exterior looks. They are based on the Presler core revision B1, which is the only revision available at this time. You can read more about the peculiarities of this core and the new 65nm production process in our article called First Look at Presler: Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 CPU Review. Now we will only dwell on the features of the Pentium D 920 and Pentium D 930 processors that are given in the table below:

These processors feature SL94S and SL94R S-Spec. These are the today’s only models available until Intel starts shipping CPUs with Presler C1 core stepping. This should happen next month. The launch of the new core stepping should also eliminate the major drawbacks of the B1 core stepping and reduce the heat dissipation of the top Pentium D models. As a result, Intel will be able to release faster models within the same family with the nominal clock rate reaching 3.6GHz. However, the slower Pentium D processor models will be the last ones to acquire the new C2 core stepping. As for the Pentium D 920, this buddy will never exist with the C1 core stepping at all.

The working frequencies of the Pentium D 920 and Pentium D 930 are 2.8GHz and 3.0GHz respectively. The CPUs support 800MHz system bus, so they can be used in any mainboards that support dual-core processors in general. Here I have to stress that these processors boast relatively low heat dissipation. Thanks to 65nm process, the youngest Pentium D CPUs turned out considerably less power hungry than their predecessors. However, when we compare them to the competitors from AMD, they will still be dissipating too much heat to be the winners in this parameter. For example, here are some results of the heat dissipation test we carried out for the youngest dual-core processor models from Intel and AMD:

However the heat dissipation of the Pentium D 920 and Pentium D 930 is noticeably smaller than what the top Pentium 4 CPUs on Prescott core would demonstrate. So, we have every right to conclude that Pentium D 920 and Pentium D 930 do not set any specific requirements to the hardware platforms.