There Once Was An Ugly Duckling . . .

A few places are reporting that Intel is going to come out with a cheap dual core, cheap as in sub-$200. You can read about it here and here.

It is a 2.66GHz chip with a 133MHz bus, 2X1MB core. Some have expressed the hope that this is a 65nm chip and be a ferocious overclockers, or at least will get AMD to lower its dual processor prices.

I’m afraid not.

Go here and you’ll see that all retail 90nm duallies have a boxed product code starting with BX80551.

65nm dual cores have a boxed product code beginning with BX80553.

Do you know the boxed product code for this CPU? Yes, we do, it’s actually on pre-sale a few places. The product code for this chip is BX80551PE2666FN.

So this is a 90nm dual core, which means that it will melt if you try to push it to 4Ghz with less than a freeze unit.

This is not a dream chip. It’s more like an ugly duckling meant to clear out inventory.

Sooner or later (probably later), we’ll see dual core Celerons and Semprons, and they will deserve serious consideration for many lighter-use systems, or maybe cheap hot-rod units.

This chip doesn’t fit those bills.

Ed