While AMD has been waving hybrid 32/64-bit CPUs for some time now, speculation has risen over when Intel would unleash their product onto an already expecting market. Here it is, Intel's newest addition to their Extreme Edition clocking in at an impressive 3.73GHz and boasting a 2MB L3 cache. The real drawcard here is the inclusion of 64-bit instructions, allowing it to operate in 32 or 64-bit, like the Athlon 64 range.
Blowing even the FX-55 out of the water in our productivity testing, the EE returned 5758 marks, over 1000 more than its nearest competition. This is due to the large L3 cache and SSE3 optimisations. Interestingly this huge margin was narrowed in both hardware and software transform and lighting render modes with only a few hundred points separating the two. This flipped in Far Cry, the EE only managing third place, outperformed by AMD's 4000+ CPU in Bunker, but reclaiming first place with an impressive 106.9 frames per second average in the geometrically intensive Treehouse level.
Given this an enthusiast CPU, expect to pay a small fortune to own one, although the 64-bit extensions mean you're future-proofed for at least the next Windows release.