Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger came as close as he's likely to get before the chip's launch to admitting that 'Prescott', the next generation of the Pentium desktop processor, dissipates more than 100W of power.

Speaking to reporters at Intel Developer Forum in San Jose today, Gelsinger didn't confirm Prescott's alleged 103W power rating; but speaking about processors in general, he said: "100W for a desktop is OK".

If that's not managing expectations for Prescott, we don't know what is. That Intel believes it's fine for a desktop CPU to dissipate 20-odd Watt more power than today's Pentium 4 does, is a sign that future chips - e.g. Prescott - will indeed pump out rather more heat than an 85W 'Northwood' P4.

Moving beyond 32-bit addressing is "really not needed for several more years", he told reporters attending the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose.

AMD, of course, isn't going to wait that long. Next week, the company will unveil its long-awaited 64-bit desktop processor, the Athlon 64. And, just a few weeks ago, Apple began shipping its Power Mac G5 desktop based on the 64-bit IBM PowerPC 970 processor.

But if Gelsinger's comments are anything to go by, Intel believes its rivals are coming to market too early.

"How many [users] have seen the crippling 640K4GB limit on their desktop PCs?" he asked. Today, he claimed, there aren't apps that need more than the 640K4GB offered by virtual memory schemes, let alone however much physical memory is available.