I always try and look for the best in a situation and this one nearly had me stumped. I can't see how Intel can justify releasing a CPU which is slower in the majority of benchmarks unless they had something up their sleeve. I can only assume that this will be a CPU for the future, something which will show its worth in the coming months. On the other hand it does have a slight advantage. Prices for the Prescott are only slightly higher than the Northwood and distribution prices are always falling so we should see them actually become cheaper in the long run. Now the only downside with producing a CPU to be strong in future applications is that the "future" in the computing world isn't very long. Evolution happens at a staggering rate and it will only be a matter of months before the Prescott is put back on the shelf when the Pentium 5 or equivelant is released. This is why I was slightly puzzled when it was mentioned that the Prescott had 64 bit instructions that wouldn't be enabled until 2005. 2005?! The Pentium 4 has been with us for a while now in many different iterations but I really can't see it lasting, the Athlon 64 was a huge success, it surpassed mine and many others' expectations. This really isn't going to win Intel the performance crown, certainly not with the 3700+ and the 4000+ 64 bit CPU's on the horizon...