| Just as an aside, the P4 Northwood processor is a damned fine chip.
Now, the Willamette core, the initial P4 core, was a piece of, er, detritus. Released too soon, shoddy architecture...and even the initial chipset was acknowledged to be a dead-end stopgap. That was a bad idea, and a classic example of marketers dictating product line.
Northwood, however, was what the intention for the P4 line was all along. The Northwood core may not be as powerful clock-for-clock as a Thoroughbred AMD chip, but it runs a lot faster, so in the end the difference is virtually nil...
Not gonna get into cooling and overclocking, because thats where the P4 Northwood really shines--dang cool chip, comparably.
For the record, I'm not exactly an Intel fanboy, but I can recognize good engineering when I see it, and right now Intel holds the PC x86 chip crown. I do look forward to seeing Hammer and Barton from AMD--though I sincerely hope they weren't the disappointment the T-bred was. (to be fair, the T-bred was their first foray into .13, so it really wasn't a bad effort--just not all it was touted--or perhaps merely hyped--to be) |
