The Northwood will be a P4 that runs on SDR-SDRAM such as PC133. The only thing I see that the P4 has in advantage over the Thunderbird is its extremely high memory bandwidth. When you attach a P4 with SDR-SDRAM, they'll be taking this advantage away. The nForce will show Intel just how powerful SDRAM can be, since it uses dual channel DDR-SDRAM. The P4 uses dual channel RDRAM, giving it something like 3.8GB/s of memory bandwidth. The nForce uses dual channel DDR-SDRAM, giving it something like 4.2GB/s of memory bandwidth. Now AMD needs to build a processor that can take advantage of the extra bandwidth. The Palomino has Hardware Prefetch which should boost its memory bandwidth considerably.
And BTW, christoph83, no AMD does not do that. AMD cannot afford to loose customers merely due to price gouging.