at the moment, yes it SUCKS. it's too damn slow when it competes clock-for-clock with p3 and tbird. and the recalling for overheating p4 doesn't help brightening up intel's day, especially after a lousy year they already had. the problem right now is that, although the 20stage pipeline is useful for future more complex code decoding, the pipeline is too long for present programs, and even get penalized more when it mispredicts instructions. but as softwares begins to get more complex in the upcoming year or so, p4 will prove to be a very capable contender, especially with it's massive memory bandwidth. this will, of course provide major competition against amd. but fear not, for amd already have plans for lines of cpu. this competition we're seeing right now is just the tip of the ice berg.\
-out-