Photos and technical data of an extremely rare Intel processor that never went on sale have appeared online. It is an engineering sample of the Pentium Extreme Edition 980 with a clock frequency of 4.0 GHz, which belongs to the NetBurst architecture. This is reported by Tom's Hardware.
Reddit user diegunguyman posted pictures of the chip from both sides, as well as a screenshot from the CPU-Z program. There was no factory marking on the processor itself - only a handwritten inscription with the model number and frequency. Due to the peculiarities of the CPU-Z database, the chip does not pass standard validation, so the owner turned to experts r/pcmasterrace and r/Intel for additional information.
Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 980 processor prototype with 4.0 GHz
diegunguyman
As it turned out, the processor is built on the Presler core and has two cores with Hyper-Threading support. Its appearance explains that Intel did experiment with higher Pentium 4 frequencies, but the serial release did not happen. The reason was high heat dissipation and limitations of the NetBurst architecture.
According to the participants of the discussion, this instance belongs to the category of so-called Employee Loaner Chips - samples that the company provided to employees for testing. Such processors are rarer than regular engineering versions, as their use was regulated by strict conditions. One commentator, who introduced himself as a former Intel employee, noted that after large-scale cuts, control over such samples has virtually disappeared.
The Intel Pentium 4 is a line of desktop processors from the early 2000s, based on the NetBurst architecture, whose main goal was to achieve high clock speeds (up to 3.8 GHz). These processors are known for their Hyper-Threading technology for processing two data streams with a single core, but are also remembered for their significant heat generation and relatively low efficiency of executing instructions per clock cycle.
The final decision to abandon this line was made after the company's transition to the Core architecture, which focused on the ratio of performance and power consumption. It was this strategy that allowed Intel to stop the growth of popularity of AMD Athlon 64 and X2 processors in 2006.