The Intel Kentsfield comes in at 2.66GHz

Intel has let slip some interesting details about the upcoming Kentsfield quad-core processor Each of the cores will run at 2.66GHzdue to make an appearance towards the end of this year.

First, Kentsfield will ship as a Core 2 Extreme branded processor (should that be Core 4 Extreme???).  Each of the cores will run at 2.66GHz and it will have a front-side bus of 1066MHz.  Basically, this means that this Kentsfield processor is two Core 2 Duo E6700 processors packed onto a single CPU.  One thing I'm interested in finding out is whether double the cores means double the heat.  While dual core and quad cores are going to be better than running two or four separate processors, I'd still like to know how much extra heat this is going to mean in the real world.

Intel doesn't provide us with a shipping date, but we do have a price - $999, which was to be expected since this has been the initial price for every "Extreme" branded CPU that Intel has sold.  This is a pretty good price for the Kentsfield to emerge at, considering that a single E6700 has a bulk price of $530.

The Kentsfield 2.66GHz CPU is no slouch either.  An enthusiast at XtremeSystems who got hold of an engineering sample managed to take one to nearly 5GHz (4.75GHz to be exact).  This indicates that Kentsfield processors, just like the Conroes, are going to have huge overclocking potential.