Milo, Re: "Earlier you stated how great 4Ghz even though it was rumored to be 5Ghz. It was implied that was air cooled. My point was it wasn't air cooled, it was only 500Mhz faster than last IDF and it's NW. I was expecting more. Weren't you?"
I would have been more impressed if it were air cooled, yes, but either way, Intel's roadmap doesn't show 4GHz, much less 5GHz, for a very long time. I'd rather see air cooled 3GHz demos running digital->3D photography and HDTV software decoding than a "Gee-whiz" demo of a processor at 4GHz doing nothing except showing a CPUID screen.
Of course, I think it's clear that Northwood has a lot of headroom. Will it be enough to compete with Hammer? Maybe with the 533MHz front side bus and PC1066 RDRAM, we'll see a 3GHz Pentium 4 only slightly behind AMD's M3400+ Hammer (as opposed to >10% behind). Then, I think, Intel can survive until Prescott in the second half of 2003. A lot of it will still have to do with AMD's execution of Hammer. Hammer could deliver everything it promises and more, but on the other hand, delays are still possible, as well as infrastructure problems. AMD is still debuting a brand new architecture with a brand new topology for the consumer markets, and it's still questionable how easily they will be able to proliferate their design, even after it launches.
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