Like everyone, I'm impresseed that the architecture is down to 90 nanometers, but the early impressions are that Prescott is no great jump in performance than the prior generation. I have a P4 chip running at 3.06, it costs from 160 to 300 on the open market, why should I plunk down 700-900 or whatever the going rate for a "new" chip will be? .......say, isn't Moore's Law running out of time!!!?Randy Jura, KPDX

Hi Randy,Did you see the article about it in the business section of the Oregonian this morning, too? It seems as though industry pundits aren't too impressed with it yet. It occurs to me that we seem to be seeing some ###### in Moore's armor at the moment... at the rate things are going, processing power won't have doubled in the last 18 months. It's alright, though. I've got other things to spend money on right now anyway!

I am very happy about this new chip!You know why?Maybe it will dump the price of the P4 chip and since I am still running a PIII 1ghz chip, I will now be able to justify upgrading my mainboard to the P4.I did this several years ago when the PIII came out and I picked my mainboard, CPU, and ram for around $130.00.What a deal!Happy Simming!Scott :-)

Read Tomshardware review.Not very impressed about the new chip. Many applications are actually running slower.Michael J.http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

I agree, I'm also not too impressed with it after reading Tomshardware review and seeing the TechTV review on TV. Kind of looked like the reviewer on TV wasen't too impressed with it either. Andrew

The Prescott is WORSE in performance than the Northwood Pentium 4 UNLESS it is above 3.4GHz in speed. The higher the Prescott's clock speed, the more of a performance per clock advantage it'll have over the Northwood. So I wouldn't even consider a Prescott until the higher clock speed CPU's are released. By then the still extremely speedy Northwood P4C's will only become cheaper.

That's true. Remember how the same thing happened with the first P4 chips? The first P4s were slower than the faster Pentium IIIs. Maybe in a year or so, it might be worth upgrading, but not yet.

Don't forget the PCI Express bus comming up soon should drive down the price of high end AGP graphics cards to go along with the cheaper P4c CPUs. I love it!David

>>Don't forget the PCI Express bus comming up soon I think this 'soon' is in 2005....Michael J.

Intel's 2004 roadmap includes for Prescott II on the Grantsdale chipset a PCI-Express ONLY graphic slot. No AGP.Also, VIA is planning to release a chipset this year that includes BOTH a PCI-Express and an AGP Slot for those who don't want to take the plunge to PCI-Express immediately.Finally, it is rumoured that ATI's next big thing, the RV420, will be offered in both AGP and PCI-Express form.

I was just about to come post a thread about this after seeing the AVSIM front page - the Prescott is by all accounts a huge letdown. The Athlon 64 is by FAR the better buy right now and is only gonna get better in a few months with the introduction of dual-DDR and PCI-X motherboards for them. I'm not sure what Intel's strategy here is, but it sure doesn't make sense to me, they're getting blown away by AMD and as soon as 64bit XP comes out it's gonna be an even bigger gap...

> The Athlon 64 is by FAR the better buy right>now ..>make sense to me, they're getting blown away by AMD and as..Not so fast. In terms of what is a better 'buy' to run your FS9 you look for performance versus $$ and here a 'regular' P4 around 2.8/3.0 (with plenty of overclocking left) is probably the best buy. And Intel is lowering their prices even further - that may be the best side effect of the Prescott release. For neither Prescott's nor AMD's "64-bitness" time has not come yet ...Michael J.

Hello,Well, I'd imagine that Intel will release a consumer(cheaper) version of their 64-bit Itanium processor. The problem I see with that is the move to 64-bit will most likley be a slow and long ordeal just like the move from 16-bit to 32-bit was. Although a lot of companies and websites have been running a fully 32-bit OS's for quite a while(NT and/or Linux) most consumers have only been running fully 32-bit since WinXP came out, unless you have been a Linux user at home of course. And the Intel Itanium only runs 32-bit stuff in emulation mode, which is slow. While the AMD processors run 32-bit or 64-bit stuff in full glory, no emulation. People are going to want to run their 32-bit stuff, without it being slow I'm sure, for a long time even after 64-bit OS's come around. But from what I have seen Intel hates not being on top, so it might be interesting to see what they come up with as an answer, that is if they can.Jim

Hey Bill, are you a fellow Oregonian?, I hail down Wilsonville way.

I'd like to see the Flight Simulator enabled for parallel processing. With two or more cheap processors (or hyperthreding) you would probably have more performance than with the newest single chip. Does anyone knows if Microsoft is going to implement this?Greg