I'll speak to what I know just a little bit about.

Whats new? What is significantly faster than last year's P4 2.4/400 ?

Depends on your definition of "significant," but a P.4 3.2 on a 875 motherboard is quite a bit faster than a P4 2.4/400. The 400MHz P4's are really a lot slower than the 533MHz, and especially the 800MHz ones. The following test is showing 20% increase for MPEG encoding just going from 2.53 to 3.0 so the difference from 3.2 to 2.4 would even be larger.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20030414/i875p-21.html

In addition, Prescott is supposed to scale to 4GHz by the end of the year.


What about hard disk technology? Any big differences? Is serial ATA any faster than IDE ?

Serial ATA is theoretically faster than EIDE, but in reality, hard drives cannot exceed the capacity of either interface.

As you can see here the fastest SCSI drives can't even do 80GB/sec.

http://storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php

ATA 133 is capable of 133MB/sec transfer rate, well above 80MB/sec for actual drives. Serial ATA transfer is faster yet, but still no drives to take advantage of it.

The only performance advantage to Serial ATA is during reads from the disk buffer, which can occur at the max transfer speed of the interface, I'm not sure, but I think it's 187.5MB/sec for Serial ATA I. The benifits from buffer reads are marginal at best for most computing work.

Serial ATA does improve case ventilation and the thin wires are easier to route!

Mark