Intel is one of the biggest driving forces in the computer world. Intel manufactures motherboard chipsets, CPUs, networking products, and other computer products. With a market capitalization of over 100 Billion USD, Intel CPUs make up the vast majority of personal computer CPUs sold in the market today. My personal computer at home used Intel CPUs exclusively until very recently when I started using a AMD Athlon 4000.

The last year has been an interesting one for computers. Intel announced the LGA-775 platform in April of last year along with a host of new technologies to support that platform. PCI Express, DDR2 memory, native SATA support, DirectX 9.0 class graphics (Intel GMA900), a new form-factor (BTX), and other new technologies that no computer today comes without. Earlier this year Intel introduced the dual core CPUs and 64-bit support on the CPUs.

The first dual-core CPUs were announced a couple of months ago in the form of the 840 Extreme Edition. The 840 EE won some of the benchmarks against it’s single core brother and lost others. The target price for the 840EE was $1000, out of the reach of most consumers buying a new processor today. Intel traditionally has sold multiple speed clocks of their CPUs and with varying levels of cache and other differences to differentiate the more expensive versions of the CPU between each other. Enter the 820.