Ace's Hardware (http://www.aceshardware.com/) has filed another report about Intel's forthcoming Prescott chips and suggests that the main reason for the introduction is to give the chip company a chance to update the clock frequencies in the Pentium 4 family.

The article suggests that while the Prescott will have better cache and a slightly improved branch predictor, these effects will probably be "totally negated" by the higher branch misprediction penalty.

Source: The Inquirer (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13475).

This will probably last until SS3 software becomes available and also further optimizations

SSE3 is just another floating point extension. It will help multimedia but will do little for anything else. Also, new complex instructions dealing with lots of data make the cost of a false branch prediction even higher, especially on a HyperThreading CPU.

True, but i ment to say that until software is written to support the new SS3 instructions and the improved HT (monitor and wait), as the article says a Presscot 3.4 will perform as a Northwood 3.4