Originally posted by: MadRat
90nm, really? The internal bandwidth of the Prescott should set it way apart from the older Pentium-4. They probably got the thing crippled, Celeron-style, as far as connections and associativity to the internal caches.
....AND there it goes... way off to left FIELD!
Electrons will only move through the cpu as fast as they are clocked, regardless of manufacturing size (withholding stalls). The 90nm wont by itself make the prescott any faster, but the 90nm and strained silicon enable intel to crank up the clock speed faster. Thats is the advantage of 90nm. And as for crippling it like the celeron... Why would they do that to their next flagship cpu?
There is though, as I understand it, a bottleneck that can occur when the transistor gates get too narrow, but I dont think this becomes a problem until around 45nm process, and that will be solved by the time they get there with things like triple gates and such.