Intel: Find foot, point gun. Shoot.

It’s amazing how a company with the combined creative talents of Intel could shoot itself in the foot so badly and, apparently, so easily. By over-lapping older Northwood and new Prescott CPU speeds (3GHz-3.4GHz), Intel has created a huge indecision tree. The older processors are actually slightly faster than the newer ones, although the performance delta appears to shrink at the high end of their comparative speeds (and, theoretically, the Prescotts should start to come out ahead beyond 3.4GHz –if there were Northwoods at higher speeds. There aren’t.)

In the meantime I’ve seen vendors using 3GHz Prescott systems as their mainstream computers. Big mistake. Anything less than 3.4GHz (and possibly 3.4GHz itself) should be consigned to entry level where the prices are low enough to at least provide some meager incentive to buy them. Personally, if I was in the market to get a new computer now I’d try to weasel out of that market for a while longer until this whole Prescott v. Northwood thing shakes out.