All told, the Pentium 4 600 series represents good progress for Intel. Power consumption is down, performance is up a bit, and some of the new features are important developments, like 64-bit support and SpeedStep. Unfortunately, the jump from 1MB of L2 cache to 2MB doesn't seem to offer big returns in most desktop applications, but it doesn't hurt, either. I haven't yet tested 64-bit performance, so I won't comment on that, although it's nice to know the capability is in the chip.

Having said that, I am a little bit conflicted about what to think. The truth is that all of the new capabilities in this processor—dynamic power management, NX bit protection, 64-bit extensions, and better performance than the Pentium 4 500 series—were available in the first Athlon 64 processors that debuted in September 2003. AMD vaulted so far out ahead of Intel in terms of technology and performance that it's taken quite a while for Intel to catch up.