Anand maps out the performance delta here while trying to suggest that Prescott's future will be bright. You can easily see what's going on here: the performance gap narrows (not widens!) as the two CPUs ramp up in speed between 2.8 and 3.2 GHz. Why this is a secret isn't entirely clear... some would call it the point of a core revision. But one thing is clear: as speed ramps up, you tend to see Prescott get closer and closer to being almost as fast as Northwood. It's only an assumption, although a logical one, that the trend will continue in a positive fashion, and at some point (say, 3.6GHz) Prescott will be shipping consistently faster than Northwood, presuming that you could clock Northwood that far.

In other words, Prescott is being released at a speed below its ideal debut point, which suggests that Intel is indeed having some serious problems with the CPU. The problem isn't the 90nm fab process, though. It looks as though Intel has this down. Rather, one must consider the 40+ million new transistors into the mix. Indeed, the problem with Prescott (almost sounds like a movie title) is heat, heat, heat. That's the oddity of the situation: usually a shrink in die size results in less heat, but Prescott has extra mojo on board in terms of the expanded L2 cache (now 1MB), some additional SSE logic (13 new instructions for SSE3), HyperThreading improvements, and more.