Prescott will be no faster than Pentium 4

ACE'S HARDWARE has filed another report about Intel's forthcoming Prescott chips and suggests that the main reason for the introduction is to give the chip company a chance to update the clock frequencies in the Pentium 4 family.

The article suggests that while the Prescott will have better cache and a slightly improved branch predictor, these effects will probably be "totally negated" by the higher branch misprediction penalty.

Says the article: "This means that some software will not run, clock for clock, faster on the Prescott than on the Northwood P4".

It says that a 3.4GHz Prescott will perform similarly to a Northwood 3.4GHz.

There's much more on this, here. µ

See Also
Prescott ready to roll under Pentium 4 guise
Intel misses Pentium 4 goals in 2003
Pipeline changes could slow Intel's Prescott down