Our benchmarks have dramatically illustrated the power of thread-level parallelism to enhance performance. The Pentium Extreme Edition 840 was able to take advantage of this effect to outshine its primary single-core competitors, the Athlon 64 FX-55 and P4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz, in a range of multithreaded applications. Even without considering its multitasking benefits, the Pentium XE 840 looks like a worthy addition to Intel's Extreme Edition lineup, so long as threading is the name of the game. Throw in the smoother multitasking that comes with any SMP system, and the logic behind the XE 840 begins to make sense.

Unfortunately, not all applications are multithreaded, and many won't be for months or even years into the future. The relatively slow 3.2GHz clock speed of the XE 840 demands a real shift in mindset in order to accept the loss of single-threaded performance in exchange for multicore bliss. I wouldn't expect big-time PC gamers, some of the Extreme Edition line's supposed target customers, to accept this tradeoff willingly. Gamers would be better served by the P4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz, or, as we have pointed out in the past, practically any variety of Athlon 64 down to the 3500+. Non-gamers who use mainly single-threaded applications may not want to accept the XE 840's slower performance, either.