"Intel is in the middle of a complete and utter redesign of their chips - from the ground up, they'll be a different architecture. I think we've only tasted the notion of "speed"!"

The new "Core" design is essentially Pentium 3 technology.

I'm entirely unconvinced about us seeing significant speed improvements in the near to mid future, at least as far as Bryce is concerned. The marketing talk now is about power saving and efficiency for normal computing activities rather than raw number crunching power for games (and 3D rendering).

The techies have run into a limit of how fast they can make chips go, and their only recourse for now is to have multiple slower chips running together. Unless and until Bryce can take advantage of this parallelism approach (straightforwardly and reliably), then there isn't much in all this for us.