We reported last week about astonishingly high pricing of today’s top CPUs from Intel and AMD aimed at gamers and enthusiasts. Even though PC history saw milestone chips, such as 1000MHz or 100MHz, quoted even higher, the situation now is a bit different: both Pentium 4 Extreme Edition as well as Athlon 64 FX-51 are not milestones – they are just a couple of overpriced microprocessors. In this case it is interesting to note the rumoured final price of Intel’s Extreme Edition CPU: $925 in 1000 units quantities, according to DigiTimes.

Intel Pentium 4 processor Extreme Edition is based on the core intended for servers and known under Gallatin code-name. The desktop processor does not support SMP and is fully compatible with existing Socket 478 infrastructure and 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus. With 3.20GHz core-clock, 512KB of L2 cache and 2MB of L3 cache, the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition provides an alternative to AMD’s high-end Athlon 64 processors with 1MB of L2 cache.

In case the unofficial report is correct and the chip is to be priced at $925 in quantities starting from 1000 units, its retail pricing will be about $1000, even higher than we originally suggested.

The staggering price of Intel’s top-edge desktop chip mirrors the company’s plan to offer the Extreme Edition product to the customers that desire extreme performance at any possible price. As we noted already, the market of hardware enthusiasts has been growing and it becomes very lucrative to serve its needs. As a result, both Intel and AMD may in future continue offering such Extreme devices to advanced end-users.