<< The Athlon's heat problem is due to inneficient trace layout and other poor design features.
The Athlon, as a previous-generation architecutre, benifits from not having to deal with a highly latent pipeline, like the P3 does not have to (and you will note that the P3 out-performs the Athlon at the same clock speed). When all of the P4's features are used, the P4 performs substantially MORE results at the same clock speed. But, as we have discovered (and what should be common knowledge by now) legacy applications do not use any of the P4's extra features, so it relies on the strength of it's clock.
The Athlon will not hit 2Ghz at it's current process. >>
<-- I beg to differ on this.
in some case it does, in other cases it doesn't. Also, there was an app called pov-ray thay some members on the board compiled with SSE2 optimizations a while back. While the p4 gain 50% increase in performance, when it came down to clock per clock, the p3 was still faster. While the athlon was a lot more efficient in finishing the 3d renders. Even a duron was doing better on a clock for clock basis. Also the athlon gain from the optimizations done to the Pov-ray app.
I am not going to get in a argument about the Athlon's trace layouts, and whether it is or not a factor in the athlon's heat output. I will say this, there is very little reason for the athlon not to be able to hit 2ghz on the next core with the current .18 micron process. Even with the current athlon people are able to hit 1.5 and 1.6 Ghz using conventional cooling. The next athlon core with have less heat output, improved branch prediction, hardware prefetch, and some additional improvements to the core. This core will be introduced at 1.533 Ghz.
We should also see an increase in performance on a a clock for clock basis vs the current athlon core.