Successor

Successor

Intel Core 2

The Pentium D brand was succeeded on July 27, 2006 by the Core 2 branded line of microprocessors with the Core microarchitecture released as dual- and quad-core CPUs branded Duo, Quad, and Extreme.

Implementation

In a single-processor scenario, the CPU-to-northbridge link is point-to-point and the only real requirement is that it is fast enough to keep the CPU fed with data from memory.

When assessing the Pentium D, it is important to note that it is essentially two CPUs in the same package and that it will face the same bus contention issues as a pair of Xeons prior to the Dual Independent Bus architecture introduced with the Dual-Core Dempsey Xeons. To use a crude analogy one could say that instead of using a single cable between CPU and north bridge, one must use a Y-splitter. Leaving aside advanced issues such as cache coherency, each core can only use half of the 800 MT/s FSB bandwidth when under heavy load.

Comparison to Pentium Dual-Core

Intel subsequently released a new line of processors based on the Core architecture under the name Pentium Dual Core. While the new Pentium Dual-Core processors boast considerably less wattage consumption opposed to the Pentium D (Using only 65W with Pentium D using 95W or 130W), it only has 1MiB L2 Cache memory while Pentium D boasts up to a 2x2 MiB L2 Cache memory. It should be noted that despite these differences, the Pentium dual-core still outperforms the Pentium D with most applications.