Honestly...
this CPU looks great on paper. SSE2, higher memory bandwidth utilization than anything before, 1MB of Cache. But based on this perview, it did not deliever. Possibly the most dissapointing thing was the SSE2/P4 Optimized apps. The SSE2, and the P4's massive bandwidth numbers were the two main things that gave it the lead in those apps, and yet the A64 didn't fare too well. Another thing is that IMB of L2 Cache. It seems completely clear to me after Barton that the Athlon is just not a huge benefiter from the L2 Cache of the Northwood and Prescott. AMD needs to get the ClawHammer to 2GHz at least, and If we have a 512k L2 ClawHammer, I bet that there is not a big performance advantage for the 1MB version, thus it is a waste of diespace and really, the A64 needs MHz not more cache. It may be the best thing to do...for now, but if I were in AMD's place based on the information we have, I would not hesitate to go down to 512k or 256k L2 if it would improve Mhz.
I do sympathize with what people are saying about the Prescott. If the P4 architechure gained 10% in going from 256 to 512k L2 Cache, I would expect going from 512 to 1MB to weild at least 10, probably 15%, especially with HT. So the 3.4 Prescott is likely to perform like a 3.7-3.8GHz Northwood, and that says nothing about the scaling of Prescott.
We'll see. But I think that it should be pointed out (and MAD is certainly keeping this in mind) that the more important and possibly more industry impacting launch is not the athlon 64 but the Opteron. If the Opteron is competitive in the 4-way and 8-way markets, that will bring in more money for AMD then ever, and surely will impact their desktop division and manufacutring facilities in the long run.
To add one last thing about the Opteron, If these memory bandwidth numbers are any indication, the Opteron has MASSIVE potential to blow Intel out in certainly the 2-way, and should be fairly competitive with the 4-way Xeon MP systems. Although in practicality, the Opteron won't get CPU's times 5.4GB/s of bandiwidth, it sure is a pretty hot possibility that the 2-way Opteron systems that will be reviewed on Tuesday will get at the very least 6GB/s of memory bandwidth, which does not compare one bit to Intel's current Xeon MP solutions.