I think what is most disturbing about this is the almost complete lack of letting us know what lies beyond the 2mb cache chips. Frankly we see the extreme chips now, and we have a great idea how the 2mb Prescotts will perform. In fact we have a pretty good idea what would happen if they moved to 4mb of cache, but frankly we have no idea what kind of cpu we'd drop in after that.
LGA 775 is "promised" to be compatible with a future chip beyond those Prescott 2mb's and I find it hard to believe that promise when they honestly don't know, or won't tell exactly what that chip entails.
Why is this valuable? Why do we care to know now? Because, for me, gaming still favors a quality single core. What has been valuable up till now is that the HT of the P4 gives us good multitasking as well as "decent" gaming. If the future of P4 is to branch out, and this is what this news sounds like, then they are going all out multitasking and they are seemingly giving up on the gaming area entirely.
They will focus on mass volume markets. They have outlined NO functional platforms for the various tasks.
So do we salute AMD for giving us a "what you can get now and what you can plug in later"? Yes we do. Because Intel is failing on yet another front they used to do well at, letting us be assured that those super expensive parts we are buying today, motherboards and the rest, are useful for a chip generation beyond what we have. AND they would usually indicate what those chips were likely to do for the various market segments.
Now we have a thorough black hole. It's like their ability to compete with AMD is collapsing in one huge "don't worry we'll figure a way out" press release. Heck they aren't even saying this openly, which is even worse.
I'll make a bold prediction. They have NO plan beyond adding cache to Prescott. They have no idea how to get a Dothan to scale past 2.5ghz, let alone how to add 64bit ability to it, and they are seriously considering copying everything AMD has done right down to the on chip memory controller, meaning they would throw out every single compatibility they currently have out the window.
When corporations get worried about drastic things, they get real quiet. And you know what, Intel is VERY, very quiet
From Xbit labs, and I agree.