Intel Corp., world’s largest chipmaker, has announced a new addition of Pentium 4 Extreme Edition microprocessor yesterday to add to its line of high-end chips. Along with the faster 3.46GHz desktop microprocessor, the company also launched a new high-end chipset – 925XE – to support this particular chip.

The new CPU from Intel is featured on Gallatin (similar to Intel’s Xeon microprocessor architecture, which is designed for high-end enterprise level tasks) core with 2MB of L3 cache. The company’s current line of "regular" chips feature 2MB of L2 cache. Both chips are based on Intel’s recently released LGA775 socket packaging.

One of the key improvements that the new chip and the new chipset display is the addition of 1066MHz front-side bus speed. A 200Mhz increase in clock speed and support for 1066MHz system bus pretty much sums up the entire launch.

This is expected to be the last major launch from Intel until next year when the chipmaker will announce its plans to unveil dual-core microprocessors, that are expected to be launched in late 2005, and improved revisions of the current Pentium 4 line with more on board cache to increase performance.

Numerous product analysts are skeptical of Intel’s future and their corporate decisions. "We can only wonder what Intel is thinking, releasing an entirely new chipset just four months after they released the original. Granted with very few 925X designs on the market right now, there shouldn't be too many upset 925X owners, but it's still a very strange situation. Either the 1066MHz FSB is going to make its way to CPUs faster than we have anticipated, or Intel has just introduced the world's first useless FSB improvement for the next 9 months," said Anand Lal Shimpi, CEO and Editor-in-Chief, AnandTech.com.

[H]ard|OCP, another online publication said, "This 3.46EE and 925XE launch can be summed up rather quickly, and I think Intel knows that they are not going to get a lot of kind press today. Then again, maybe they are launching at noon on Sunday here in North America during NFL football season to get more attention? And on Halloween? I think Intel has put this launch where they think it can do the least amount of damage by actually being noticed."

The performance differences between the newer and older Pentium 4 chips are negligible, which is positive news for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Intel’s archrival, as they have been gaining momentum in the industry since the launch of their 64-bit microprocessors back in September 2003.

Dell said they are planning to introduce a new XPS gaming system based on the new chip and the new chipset. The system is expected to cost around $2749 and will be equipped with latest, Intel-based technologies such as PCIe for graphics and DDR2 for system memory.

HP and Gateway are taking another side and said they will thoroughly evaluate the company’s technologies before making the final cut.