Yep.. less pipelines = more IPC (instructions per clock cycle). Netburst has deep pipelines (21 stage on Northwood, 31 stage on Prescott, as opposed to 12 on the Tualatin and Athlon XP/64s), to achieve higher clock speeds. Another side-effect of longer pipelines is that you need a good amount of cache to keep the core from "stalling" due to insufficient cache memory for the CPU when it's working its little heart off (Williamette had 256KB aswell as Tualatin.. do the math
). Deep pipelines mean the CPU often gets ahead of itself and requires alot of fast cache. I overclocked my Tualatin 1.2 to 1.8 completely stable, and I was benching higher than a 2GHz Williamette in all game/synthetic tests with the exception of Quake III, obviously. At stock it was still scoring higher than any Willie in the 1.3-1.7GHz range. Now XxCrashxX, if your CPU is a Northwood, I really doubt a Tualatin would outperform it.
Things have changed with Northwood though, the 512KB L2 Cache really helps Netburst thrive. The 1MB on the Prescotts is even better for it, but the cache is significantly higher latency than the cache on northwoods, which requires a hefty (3.6GHzish) clock speed to really achieve amazing performance with Prescott.
I really love my 3.2C.. got it for $55 instead of $275 which is what Newegg asks.. worth every penny.
If I didn't have this deal, I would have definitely went the A64 route, which is what I recommend for anybody purchasing a new CPU.
Oh, and makotech, the 5500 is nothing more than a 5200 with a slight clock increase (275MHz as opposed to 250 of a 5200)..
