Mobile Pentium 4

Mobile Pentium 4

The Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor was released to address the problem of putting a full Pentium 4 desktop chip into a laptop, which some manufacturers were doing. The Mobile P4 still used 70 W of power, which let it bridge the gap between the full Pentium 4 (using about 82 W), and the Mobile Pentium 4 M (using about 35 W).

Mobile Pentium 4 M

Also based on the Northwood core, the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor - M was released on April 23, 2002 and included Intel's SpeedStep and Deeper Sleep technologies, and Hyper-Threading in some models. Intel's naming conventions made it difficult at the time of the processor's release to identify the processor model.There was the Pentium III mobile chip (or the PIII-M), the Mobile Pentium 4 M (or the P4-M), the Mobile Pentium 4 (or the Mobile P4), and then just the Pentium M which itself was based on the Pentium III. Its TDP is about 35 Watts in most applications. This lowered power consumption was due to lowered core voltage, and other features mentioned previously.

Gallatin (Extreme Edition)

In September 2003, at the Intel Developer Forum, the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (P4EE) was announced, just over a week before the launch of Athlon 64, and Athlon 64 FX (AMD64 FX). The design was mostly identical to Pentium 4 (to the extent that it would run in the same motherboards), but differed by an added 2 MB of Level 3 cache. It shared the same Gallatin core as the Xeon MP, though in a Socket 478 form factor (as opposed to Socket 603 for the Xeon MP) and with an 800 MT/s bus, twice as fast as that of the Xeon MP. An LGA775 version is also available.

While Intel maintained that the Extreme Edition was aimed at gamers, some viewed it as an attempt to steal the Athlon 64's launch thunder, nicknaming it the "Emergency Edition". With a price tag of ~$1000, it was also referred to as the "Expensive Edition" or "Extremely Expensive". Many condemned Intel for cannibalizing the Xeon line, but no such complaints were aimed at AMD's Athlon 64 FX-51, which was merely a repackaged Opteron 148.

The effect of the added cache was somewhat variable. In office applications, the Extreme Edition was generally a bit slower than the Northwood, owing to higher latency added by the L3 cache. Some games benefited from the added cache, particularly those based on the Quake III and Unreal engines. However, the area which improved the most was multimedia encoding, which was not only faster than the Pentium 4, but also faster than both Athlon 64s.

A slight performance increase was achieved in late 2004 by increasing the bus speed from 800 MT/s to 1066 MT/s. Only one Gallatin-based chip at 3.46 GHz was released before the Extreme Edition was migrated to the Prescott core. The new 3.73 GHz Extreme Edition had the same features as a 6x0-sequence Prescott 2M, but with a 1066 MT/s bus. In practice however, the 3.73 GHz Extreme Edition almost always proved to be slower than the 3.46 GHz version.

The 'Pentium 4 Extreme Edition' should not be confused with a similarly-named later model, the 'Pentium Extreme Edition', which is based on the dual-core Pentium D.