Pentium D

The Pentium D[2] brand refers to two series of dual-core 64-bit x86 processors with the NetBurst microarchitecture manufactured by Intel. Each CPU comprised two single-core dies (CPUs) - next to each other - in one Multi-Chip Module package. The brand's first processor, codenamed Smithfield, was released by Intel on May 25, 2005. Nine months later, Intel introduced its successor, codenamed Presler[3], but without offering significant upgrades in design[4], still resulting in a relatively high power consumption[5]. By 2005, the NetBurst processors reached the clock speed barrier at 4 GHz due to a thermal (and power) limit exemplified by the Presler's 130 W TDP[5] (a high TDP requires additional cooling that can be noisy or expensive). The future belonged to more efficient and slower clocked dual-core CPUs on a single die instead of two. The dual die Presler's[6] last shipment date on August 8, 2008 [7] marked the end of the Pentium D brand and also the NetBurst microarchitecture.

Pentium D Extreme Edition


The dual-core CPU runs very well with multi-threaded applications typical in transcoding of audio and video, compressing, photo and video editing and rendering, and ray-tracing. The single-threaded applications alone, including most games, do not benefit from the second core of dual-core CPU compared to equally clocked single-core CPU. Nevertheless, the dual-core CPU is useful to run both the client and server processes of a game without noticeable lag in either thread, as each instance could be running on a different core. Furthermore, multi-threaded games benefit from the dual-core CPUs.

As of 2008 many business and gaming applications are optimized for multiple cores.[citation needed] They ran equally well when alone on the Pentium D or older Pentium 4 branded CPUs at the same clock speed. However, the applications rarely run alone on computers under Microsoft Windows, Linux, BSD operating systems. In such multitasking environments, when antivirus software or another program is running in the background, or where several CPU-intensive applications are running simultaneously, each core of the Pentium D branded processor can handle different programs, improving the overall performance over its single-core Pentium 4 counterpart.