In general, despite new processors and chipsets, we have nothing extraordinary. Yes, there's a new socket. Yes, there are new chipsets along with new memory. But we still think that the situation would hardly change, if Pentium 4 550 and Pentium 4 560 were named just Pentium 4 3.4E GHz and Pentium 4 3.6 GHz and were designed for the good old Socket 478. Some results would be better, some worse maybe (but hardly considerably bad to stress them). The main thing that Intel's new platform demonstrates is vendor's priorities and future plans: noone is going to decline Prescott despite it loses to Northwood sometimes. Especially, considering it wins over Northwood in other situations, and is particularly good with Hyper-Threading. Prescott's drawbacks will seemingly be fixed in a good old way - by clock rate.



Link: Digit-Life