The Cedar Mill core is months from being released, but Tom's Hardware Guide managed to secure a sample anyway - and it didn't come from Intel. What we discovered was that Intel's next-generation Pentium 4 is capable of bringing Prescott's single-core meltdown to an end. First things first: Cedar Mill does not perform better than Prescott since it basically is a shrunk Netburst design without major architectural modifications (details below). As a result, the performance level of the Pentium 4 653/651 we used for testing is absolutely on par with that of the Pentium 4 650 (both run 3.4 GHz).

A Sneak Peak at Intel's 65 nm Pentium 4