Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[sgolds]

Elmer, I hadn't commented on the unreleased 3.2G P4 w/2M L3 yet, but what the heck -

I'm skeptical that a lot of L3 cache will make a whole lot of difference for the target audience of gamers. Games process great quantities of sequential data, for which the cache is useless. The P4 FSB speed gets them the most boost, and that isn't changing.

Are there games where the working set of instructions won't fit in the cache of other P4s, and fit in this one? I doubt it. The working set of instructions actually isn't all that big.

What price will Intel charge for this monster desktop? Won't be cheap. High-end gamers will read the hardware reviews, and won't pay for the Intel name if there is no great performance boost. They are likely to get a chuckle from this product, and go buy an Athlon-64FX.

Especially if one or two popular game titles are updated to take advantage of a 64-bit RAM-resident data area above a couple of gig. The new P4 would choke on such a configuation!

So why is Intel planning this chip? Perhaps they are reacting to Athlon64-FX. More likely, though, the rumors that Prescott is late may be true.