The benchmarks between a 3.4GHz Pentium4 and a 3.46GHz Pentium4 show a reasonable jump in performance- partly because of the FSB speed bump but mainly because of the additional L3 cache found in the Extreme Edition. And while this CPU posted pretty reasonable scores in almost all tests, you have to realize that we've compared it to the Athlon64 4000+ which is not AMD抯 current top-of-the-line CPU. Compared to the FX55 which is AMD抯 fastest, the 3.46GHz EE will probably fade further especially since both of these products are priced at similar levels- around the US$1000/- mark (ouch.) Its because of the very high pricing of this CPU that the performance starts to pale- the Athlon64 4000+ can be bought for about US$300 less while the Athlon64 3500+ and Pentium4 3.4GHz can bought for under US$300.
Intel does need to re-evaluate their plan for competing with AMD in the fastest desktop CPU department. While the move to 1066MHz FSB is good, we think that they need to bump cache levels across the entire Pentium4 line-up and not just restrict it to their Extreme Edition series. Prices also need to be dropped to compete better against the higher performing Athlon64. Lets hope that the upcoming Prescott based 1066MHz FSB CPUs along with the Glenwood/Lakeport chipsets help improve performances even further. Or better yet, maybe Intel can use their highly efficient Pentium-M core which is designed for notebooks and tweak it a bit to build a desktop CPU.
