Prescott's birth date is 3rd December

WELL, we learned about Prescott's birth date just before IDF started but we didn't want to create panic in already-hectic days for Intel employees. Isn't that sweet?

Intel is planning to release this chip to the world on December the 3rd, we can reveal.

Till then they have to stamp upon AMD's 64-bit FX-fest, hence the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. Its 2MB of extra cache will help it give the Athlon FX a run for its money. While plain-old Athlon 64, with its single channel memory controller is barely as fast as a current P4, so Intel does not have to worry much about that.

But with Prescott simply not yet ready, Intel came up with the stop-gap of a pumped-up pentium 4.

Intel always said that Prescott would arrive in Q4 and come December they will have enough samples to sent to the press and of course to its loyal and first-always customer, Dell. The company will have some units in retail and some Prescott machines will be for sale for Xmas shopping just to to let you know it's there.

IDF reports confirmed our magical number of 103W power consumption and we reckon the primary focus of Intel's team is to make it less hot, or otherwise to buy up some company that would produce water cooling for them.

Prescott will be born at 3.2 and 3.4 GHz on December 3rd and still there is no news about its performance. The original plan is to expand its availability in Q1, so you can easily say that Prescott is more a 2004 chip than a 2003.

We'll go parrot and repeat that this CPU will be priced at 417USD for 3.2GHz and 637USD for 3.4GHz version, featuring 800 MHz FSB, 1MB cache, Prescott New Instructions (PNI) on a 90nm marchitecture.

In Q1 2004 Intel will introduce 3.6, 3.0 and 2.8GHz Prescott parts so expect Prescotts to cheapen then, to make room.

December seems the perfect time for Prescott to come to warm our hearts and cold homes and houses. µ