intel has officially canned the 4GHz P4. Instead, in the short term, it will come out with 2MB L2 Prescotts to increase performance. Later on next year, it will release the x20, x30, and x40 "digital" line of dual core processors. These chips are gonna be somewhere around 2.8GHz, 3.0GHz, and 3.2GHz, respectively. Of course, performance will not even be close to double. An estimate by AMD on dual core is that a dual core CPU 3-5 speed grades slower than the flagship chip will have performance about 20% higher than the flagship chip. I'm not sure if that 20% is the 3 step down chip or the 5 step down chip, though. Also, AMD and Intel have different dual core designs, so I'm not sure which will end up being better (AMD uses separate cache, and has more memory bandwidth, Intel uses a shared cache and is stuck on an 800MHz FSB), so we'll have to see. Anyways, after that, we'll see dual core Pentium M chips, which I expect to be much more competitive, and considering with their thermal envelopes, they won't have to scale down performance as much. Of course, they need some changes, like faster busses, add floating point performance, and hopefully 64-bit support. Of course, I'm still probably gonna be going AMD, but it's always nice to have some good competition from Intel.