ACE"S HARDWARE 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.
Says the article: "This means that some software will not run, clock for clock, faster on the Prescott than on the Northwood P4". It says that a 3.4GHz Prescott will perform similarly to a Northwood 3.4GHz.