Pentium D 900 series hits TDP glitch

According to reports from Japan, cited by The Tech Report, the first batch of Pentium D 900 series processors to arrive in the country may not have some or all of Intel's power-saving technologies in a fully functional state.

Both Intel's Enhanced HALT State and Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology may not be enabled on these processors, meaning that the TDP might go up by as much as 15 Watts.

The Pentium Extreme Edition 955, Pentium D 950 and 940 processors are all rated at a 130 Watt TDP - the same TDP as the Pentium D 840 and Pentium Extreme Edition 840. Meanwhile, the TDP of the Pentium D 930 and 920 processors is specified at 95 Watts.

Intel has released a specification update for the Pentium 900 series processors, stating that these problems will be fixed in a BIOS update that is scheduled to arrive in the next quarter.

These problems will not affect Pentium Extreme Edition 955 processor because the Presler core doesn't have multipliers lower than the default 13.0x multiplier. Because of this, Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology is not capable of bringing the CPU down to more moderate speeds due to the Extreme Edition 955 using the lowest-available multiplier and a higher front side bus.

You can read more here and you can post your thoughts in the usual place.