It seems as if Intel’s launch of the Prescott core will be delayed once again, thus consumers will not be able to see the new core until next year. News hailing from Xbit-Labs tells us that Intel will ship Prescott processors this year, but that they will not be ready for sale until January, or even not until early February. It also seems that Intel will launch yet another version of the Northwood core with 1 MB cache, as rumors have foretold.
The Prescott will with the highest probability still be a Pentium 4 processor, and no Pentium 5. Apart from the difference in cache size, the Prescott also contributes with SSE3 instructions, as compared to its predecessor.
If all this is true then it looks like the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition will have to rage war upon the Athlon 64/FX alone until next year. This will be no simple task and we are unsure if Intel will release a higher clocked version of this processor before the release of the Prescott. Especially since the 3.2 GHz model isn’t available at the market yet.
Surely, this is not good news for Intel. For AMD, on the other hand, it will be great if the Prescott holds its launch until next year. If we get to see a tweaked model of the Athlon 64/FX before the end of the year, the year 2004 will surely be a pleasurable one for AMD.
Source: Xbit-Labs.com.
