Thread: Which is hotter: AMD or Intel?

Benchmarking Pentium 4 against Athlon is a controversial thing. The right choice of applications can either make the one or the other look better or worse. Intel's new Pentium 4 at 2 GHz however is beating AMD's fastest Athlon in the majority of frequently used applications and deserves therefore the title 'fastest PC processor'. Intel won the 2 GHz race and it also retook the crown of the maker of the fastest CPU. I am hesitant, but in a way we have to respect those facts and congratulate Intel.

What remains the same however, is the fact that Pentium 4 is still significantly more expensive than a comparable Athlon processor. AMD's brand new price cuts make even the cheapest Pentium 4 look overly expensive. The price difference between Athlon 1 GHz and Athlon 1.4 GHz has become so small that almost everyone interested in a high-end system should go for an Athlon 1400. Buying a Pentium 4 would give you only marginally more performance, but for a much higher price.

Two things make it very hard for me to praise Intel any further though. The battle against VIA and its P4X266 chipset is something that I simply don't appreciate, because for us consumers, P4X266 is certainly a good thing. Basically, if Intel's managers would be real guys, they wouldn't fight with VIA in the courtroom, but release i845 with DDR-SDRAM support early and battle against P4X266 on a technology, performance and reliability level. The delay of DDR-i845 plus the threats against Taiwanese motherboard makers show that Intel is utterly unable to play it straight. I really wonder who is responsible for this attitude, since the most Intel people I know (except for a few really unpleasant ones) are honest, straightforward and hard-working guys that deserve everybody's respect. They also deserve to be represented by a management that sticks to rules of ethics and fairness to the benefit of its customers.

There's another reason why Intel's Pentium 4 2 GHz release might not be important after all. So Intel is back making the fastest processor. So Intel has won the 2 GHz race. Who really cares? The majority of people don't give a rat's behind about a 2 GHz processor! Who can blame them? Which application would justify the purchase of a 2 GHz monster for more than a tiny minority of people? Intel may have regained some prestige it lost to AMD a while ago. However, the current economical problems, the low NASDAQ and the recession in the PC-business will certainly NOT be solved with Intel's Pentium 4 2 GHz processor. What a shame!

AMD's upcoming Palomino core will bring even more performance and higher clock speeds, so the war between both companies is by no means over.

AMD continues to offer the price/performance advantage

Maybe I'm retarded, but a 600 MHz "clock speed deficiency" is hardly worth noting when the performance difference is so minimal. And if you read the articles you posted, neither overwhelmingly acclaim Intel for the feat. AMD is still #1, on a "bang for your buck" basis. And with the upcoming Palomino... Intel better be ready to stick it's tail between it's legs and go cry in the corner....

Warning: Dumbass question ahead.

Will Itanium really make that much of a difference? With most programs being written for 32 bit architectures, will it even matter?

Itanium is for servers, 64 bit computing for the general desktop user is still a ways off.

When buying for all out performance, price aside, I'd rather have a 2ghz p4. I really don't care to evaluate a company's business practice to determine what product I should get either.

Itanium actually sucks hardcore when running x86 32 bit code. Running in emulated mode, it will be lucky to be as fast as a pentium 1.

all i can say is

WOW

Does anyone know how Athlons XP stacks up against P4. Also when will it be available, I saw it once on moterboardexpress.com, the next day it was gone thought. Also what is going to be the price? The P4 1.5 ghz, is cheaper then the next highest Athlon at 1.4 ghz.

>XP? Do you mean Athlon MP?

No I mean XP. go to www.amd.com