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I've got to second the notion that overclocking isn't everything.

I've never bought a processor for that reason, and I've only overclocked a processor once. I didn't see any real reason to (without a significant investment of time and possibly expensive cooling solutions, it's hard to get a tangible benefit from it).

But, back to the topic, I guess it really is a matter of Intel's processors being better right now, no real question. It probably won't last forever, but Intel is sort of hurting AMD badly, when it's at its worst. AMD isn't really able to withstand prolonged financial disaster from what I gather (they're a much smaller company, right?).

From my experience though, AMD did used to have better performance, but then again the only processor I've ever killed was an AMD processor of some sort. Five seconds of malfunctioning cooler = dead processor. I've had Intel processors running over max spec temperature for extended period of times without permanent damage. Might have just been lucky though...

AMD is cheaper due (partly) to the extremely small L1 & L2 cache sizes on the chip.

Comparison of L2 cache sizes: These are the closes related dual-core processors that I could think of.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Brisbane 2.7GHz CPU: 2x 512k L2
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz CPU: 4M L2

thats 4x the L2 cache on the c2d... thats ALOT. =)

AMD CPU's also tend to be more effective when it comes to a variety of tasks all going on at once, because of the shorter pipe, and therefore less to time to clear/refill.

some Intel CPUS have twice the amount of space in their pipe, making them much faster at monotonous tasks

So your saying AMDs are faster at multitasking...

lukem_95 wrote:AMD CPU's also tend to be more effective when it comes to a variety of tasks all going on at once, because of the shorter pipe, and therefore less to time to clear/refill.

HI,

I know where you are coming from with this. A few years ago, you had the Athlon XP's against Prescott Pentium IV's, and this was certainly the case - Intel was much better for repetetive tasks with good branch predictability, such as video encoding and compression, whereas the AMD's were better at things like gaming, where the Intel's would have to keep flushing ridiculously long instruction pipes.

I don't know quite so much about the internals of the current chips, but I believe Intel then did a bit of a U-turn. It had always pushed for higher clock speeds and longer pipelines, but this clearly wasn't working - they just ended up with (relatively) slow, but highly-clocked and hot chips.

This all changed with the Core 2 Duo range - since which, they outperform AMD chips of a similar price level and clock speed. No doubt in a few years time, the position will reverse again.

Cheers,
Adam