Instead of using a major sports event to compete for attention with the latest product launch, Intel did move to the small hours of Sunday of the President's Day weekend for a clandestine introduction of the latest 600 series of P4 processors. The new and improved core features a number of nifty improvements in the form of Enhanced Power Management, EM64T support through added registers and last not least doubling of the L2 cache size to 2 MB. We will take it step by step to go in 31 pipeline stages over the new features and the performance impact on different types of applications. The net result is neither surprising nor earthshaking but suffice it to say that at equal pricing, the new 600 series appears a better choice than the original LGA775 Prescott 500 series.