Since we published the pins and needling story yesterday, the black shirted moles have come out of the woodwork about the innards of Prescott. Those little critters can"t stop talking. The power people told us how many pins they needed, months ago, a crazed genius told us about Prescott"s die here and here, and lots of people told us that to count said non-power pins. Peeks into the bios code told us more. Motherboard people strongly denied it, and winked at us. Something was up, it was coming from too many directions. Four strong sources, but no smoking gun. Then, in an anti-climactic burst from out of left field, it all hit at once.
This answer poses 2 more questions. The first is what instruction set do they use? The AMD64 instruction extensions are theirs to use because of licensing agreements with AMD, but we think they would sooner eat the IDF press room food than do that. MS has been long rumored to tell Intel what they can and can not do, and their record in confrontations like this are not one to bet against. Rumor has it that the vole has said that they will only support a single 64-bit extension to IA32, but then months ago they said they would be supporting 5 64-bit architectures in windows. The mystery deepens.