Right now there are hardly any important applications available that could show the strength of Pentium 4's new SSE2 features. As long as this isn't the case, Pentium 4 loses out against Athlon and sometimes even against Pentium 3, because Intel was obviously saving silicon by implementing only a rather weak FPU into Pentium 4. The other way out of this dilemma would be extremely high clock rates, but it will take a while until faster Pentium 4 processors will become available. Then there is the fact that it won't even take a year until the successor of the current Pentium 4 will become available, which will ensure that the upgrade path of current Pentium 4 systems ends in a dead end road, because the 'new' Pentium 4 will use a new and incompatible Socket478.