drjohn, first, A64 and Prescott will not have that much to compete at Christmas, as they will have only few 100K's of A64's to sell and this is just a drop in Pentium ocean, they will sell those no matter what.
Second, there is a very good chance that 130 nm A64 will be faster than 90 nm Prescott, and this will be quite a spectacular achievement. If AMD doesn't screw-up too much, they will have the equivalent of 4 Ghz P4 by the end of this year. Intel's only chance is that 3.4 Ghz Prescott will be faster than 4 Ghz Northwood. If it is not - sorry man.
Third, I think both Prescott and A64 will have to work out a huge market next year, so they both will sell like hot cakes. The reason is that there are 10's of millions of Celeron computers used as gaming machines. When Doom will come, it will retire all of them at once, so we'll see a huge upgrade cycle.
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