Good question...
P4's have a new FPU cycle mode that codes differently than the P3's..thus software companies have to tweak their codes to compensate for that...until they do the new processor isnt doing much!
Right now only business and games really benefit from the new processors and even still the Athalon's are out bench marking them..there was an article on http://www.tomshardware.com
that went over the benchmarking very precisely and laid it out in laymans' terms!
They basically said that when they tried an Audio app the system behaved like a Pentium ONE 233 MMX chip..ouch! I would stick to the upper end of the Pentium III's for now as those are still rocking hard..I'm still wary about Athalons due to their chipset companions that ride with them..a lot of hardware has issues with them..the VIA KT133 "was" looking good until the data damager bug was found in them..again ouch!
Hope that helps
Opus

I'd stick with a super-fast P3 with a lotta ram. I'm still humming along with my 550 Mhz with no problems. By the time everyone catches up with the P4, they'll already be releasing the Pentium 5! the sick farce continues......

Yes the sick farce does indeed continue. Thanks for the replies, extremely informative. Ive heard mentioned, though Im not posative on the source that photoshop 6 optomised for the pentium 4 gives a drastic improvement over just about anything else(talking like %70). Its interesting because apple has always bragged about their photoshop performance, and their Altivec velocity engine.

As an outsider looking in this seems like an interesting transition time with amd/intel straying from known x86 territory into the realms of 64 bit and risc architecture hybreds. And also we have microsoft scared to death about their revenue streams drying up taking steps that couldnt be called anything less than big brotherly.

What would just be incredible is if all these soundcard and software companies would imbrace linux and the spirit of open source(yeah keep dreaming).Until the rubbish settles from this transition to next generation duds what interests me the most is a multi processing pc.