In all honesty, the hammer is actually quite similar to the existing Athlon XP with some additional ehancements. If you remember AThlon's k7 architecture, you may be even a little surprised, since the hammer looks almost identical...
To put it simply, hammer has all the architectural advantages of its predecesoors, but adds a fair number of enhancements to them. Much in contrast to the 64 bit IA64 architextrue used by intel for its itanium line of processors, Hameers's 'X86-64' architexture is an evolutionary step bases on the exisiting x86-32 architecture, It means that hammer can run all the existing 32 bit apps without any difficulty.

What does this entail for the common user? little or nothing, for the most part sice there arent any true blue "64 bit desktop applications" that can take advantage of this technology at the moment.. The real need for 64-bit processors is with sceince and research. for most typical purposes, a 32 bit processor is more than adequate.

Hammer should only be able to run ordinary 32 bit applications a little faster.

However, a weide and fast availability of 64 bit optimised applications can, even now, tilt the scales in favour of hammer, the answer only if we get a recomplied version of Photoshop or an optimised Maya and more importantly, an early release of a 64 bit optimised OS. Unless some of this happens the Pentium 4 will by all counts reign supreme!

sorry about the spellings,, just typing a bit fast....