Re: Prescott vs. Northwood?
It amazes me that people can continue to confuse the gain in Prescott's power with a faulty process, in spite of all the discussion from countless people who know better, as well as the substantial amount of data from Dothan in how the same process can be used to reach higher performance and lower power on a more power efficient design.
Northwood was a 20-stage pipeline CPU, and Prescott is a 31-stage pipeline with a large amount of additional logic aimed at topping 5GHz clock speeds, but due to the power wall, it didn't even hit 4GHz. This was a 20% miss to expectations, and it has no likelihood of happening again with Dempsey or Presler, since both of these are simple shrinks of the 90nm equivalent.
Time to update your notes or whatever you have to do, because rehashing this well known explanation is the most useless form of forum usage I can think of.