While we originally told you that Intel would be able to bring 3.80GHz Prescott processors into the market shortly after the Prescott launch, it now seems that the company reconsidered its strategy and will roll them out only if AMD’s Athlon 64 will beat Intel’s offerings at some point. Furthermore, the Prescott CPUs will not actually rapidly gain clock-speed, as the Northwood cores did a year ago.

Intel’s next-generation desktop microprocessors which branding is yet to be determined will start at 3.40 and 3.20GHz this year and will only speed up to 3.60GHz in the first quarter next year, AnandTech reported. I believe that the Prescott 3.40GHz and 3.20GHz processors will only be available sometime in November, but not earlier. As always with Intel these days, everything may be rapidly changed, as a result, we may see the actual chips earlier. We should note that all currently sold i865G/i865PE and i875P-based Socket 478 mainboards are ready for Prescott.

Intel’s code-named Prescott processor is based on the same NetBurst architecture as all convenient Pentium 4 CPUs. However, the Prescott will have a lot of innovations, including enlarged L1 and L2 caches, more advanced pre-fetch mechanisms, more efficient Hyper-Threading technology and 13 Prescott New Instructions. The chips will consist of 100 million of transistors and will be made using 90nm strained silicon fabrication process. You may check this news-story for more information on Intel Prescott.

As I understand now, the Socket 478 Prescott will live a short live and will be replaced by Intel’s Grantsdale platform and appropriate processors in new packaging in the second quarter next year. With the announcement of the new platform as well as Socket 775 LGA packaging, the world will see the same 3.60, 3.40 and 3.20GHz Prescott processors with 1MB of L2. I am not sure if Intel actually deploys 1066MHz Quad Pumped Bus with its Grantsdale platform for the high-end Prescott processors, however, I am convinced that the successors of Prescott, the Tejas chips, will support 1066MHz QPB.