Speedy 'Wonder Patch' Debuts in New Linux Kernel
 

Just to be totally clear to those who think this patch will make day-to-day low-CPU-usage operations 10x faster at normal loads: it won't.

All it really does is tweak the process scheduler so that desktop responsiveness improves when a heavily-loaded process (or processes) of a different "group" is running in the background (e.g. video transcoding, code compiling, etc.; things typically done in a terminal).

I repeat, this patch does not magically give your Pentium 4 the performance of a Core i7.