Speak little, speak well: The Pentium 4 6XX is a huge disappointment. Officially the first processeur coming from the roadmaps 2005 of intel where a lot of products seemed promising, this new refresh of the core Prescott is far from being the messie awaited. Launched the 20 of this month to frequencies going of 3.0 GHz (630) to 3.6 GHz (660), the 6XX risks doing to flow a lot of ink to his gone out.
( excuse the badly translated french )
Nevertheless, it does not be necessary to forget that the range 6XX will cost about 25% of more than a Pentium 4 5XX of frequency equals. In these circumstances and knowing that the 5XX soon will be available in version EM64T enabled (range 5x1), which is the interest of the 6XX? Weak. Very weak, see any for certain usages.
AMD now has cheaper AND faster processors once again, with a 3ghz P4 '630' going for above 220 US , and an A64 3200 going for 199USD and less .
As you can see in the 64 bit benchmarks :
http://www.x86-secret.com/articles/cpu/p46xx/p46xx-5.htm AMD still retains its same lead in the same applications it did before , though 64 bit does work admirably well on the P4s , giving it a performance boost (most of the time ) , seeing as its the SAME THING as on the A64s just with a different name... we don't have to worry about compatability etc.
The new core is essentially the same Prescott core with more cache (more money) , less power consumption ( about 15 watt) and heat... though the L2 cache is SLOWER than before , screwing performance up in several areas .
and in conclusion : viva la AMD , intel sucks , and 64 bit is the new big thing .... Unlike dual cores , it isn't complex to optimize for , so ALL programs soon will see performance boosts due to 64 bit extensions.... save up money.... the time to upgrade is near at hand .
