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In the current roundup, the Northwood showed a healthy boost over the Willamette but, in most applications, did not quite beat the AMD Athlon XP 2000+. As mentioned, it is a matter of selection of the benchmarks but those are the benchmarks that I have always used and that I feel either are relevant for the consumer or showed the weaknesses of the Willamette core and related to that but in reality more important, the huge improvement in performance of the Northwood. There are certain caveats in the entire benchmark suite as presented here. The i845 is not (yet) the fastest chipset for the P4 platform. Using an i850-based dual channel Rambus board, things might have come out different in the one or the other benchmark, honestly, I doubt that there would have been too much difference, though. In addition, the i845 is the new mainstream chipset and that by itself is reason enough to use it as the prime evaluation platform.

On the other hand, we could have included the VIA P4X266A chipset, only, I don't have a board. The same goes with the SIS 645 chipset. A reference design is not necessarily representative of a production version and, thus, it would be comparing apples and oranges.

All in all, the Northwood is an extremely positive surprise after some years of frustration over the Willamette in any form. The Northwood has tremendous potential, not only because of its cool running but more important, because of its smaller die and the ultra small / fast transistor technology realized in its manufacturing process. In the beginning of this article, we speculated that there should not be a problem for the current Northwood to reach some 3.5-4 GHz clock speed and initial overclocking reports already show 3.0 GHz in reach. We won't discuss stability in this context, though.

Statements from Intel did not confirm our calculations, however, it almost sounded like we might be too low with our estimate.

Either way, Intel finally has a CPU that is a serious contender not only in terms of speed but also with the correct interface and enough bandwidth to the rest of the system to be able to use its power. The next steps will include even higher speed bins and we don't know how many of those are already sitting in the warehouses.

On the other side of the street, the Thoroughbreds are rearing their heads, promising the next step in clock speed as well, meaning that we are back to the old problem of memory and I/O bottlenecks we were running into only a year ago. But then, with any of the current CPUs, nobody can complain about lack of power.

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