Closer Look at Pentium D 820

Pentium D 820 processor is the youngest dual-core CPU from Intel based on the Smithfield core. This CPU is none other but a combination of two Prescott dies within a single piece of silicon.

 It works at 2.8GHz clock frequency and has no Hyper-Threading Technology support. The detailed formal characteristics of this solution are given in the table below:

I would like to draw your attention right away to a few curious things that you can see in the specification.

Firstly, Pentium D 820 processor does not support Intel Enhanced SpeedStep technology, which is available in all other dual-core processors on Smithfield core. The reason for this is the clock frequency multiplier, which equals 14x for this CPU. It is the minimum clock frequency multiplier for all processors based on modifications of Prescott core. For the same reason, Pentium D 820 does not support such technologies as C1E (Enhanced Halt State) Technology and TM2 (Thermal Monitor 2) Technology, which also require dynamic change of the CPU clock frequency multiplier.

Secondly, the low TDP level of the Pentium D 820 processor is also quite remarkable here. All other Pentium D CPUs and Pentium Extreme Edition 840 feature the thermal design power of 130W. Moreover, this characteristic of the Pentium D 820 processor is even lower than that of the top single-core Pentium 4 solutions: their TDP equals 115W. This gives us some hope that Pentium D 820 will turn out not so hot as the previously reviewed Pentium Extreme Edition 840 and will allow using pretty simply cooling solutions. Besides, relatively low heat dissipation and power consumption of the Pentium D 820 processor should make it possible for this processor to work just fine in mainboards without “enforced” CPU voltage regulator.

Other than that, Pentium D 820 doesn’t boast anything else different from its elder brothers.

CPU-Z utility provided the following info about this processor:

The operating system sees this CPU as two processors, which is actually not surprising at all, because it has two physical cores and doesn’t support “virtual multi-core architecture", i.e. the Hyper-Threading Technology.