Quote Originally Posted by currywurry
Indeed. A P4 may have more Ghz, but it's still slow when it comes to constant fast working, such as gaming. My friend fails to understand this and thus won't join the AMD clan of processor users, and thus is paying the price in not being able to play good games as well as he'd like to. He just looks at the Ghz and thinks that the P4 must be better with it's 2.7Ghz, yet he always marvels at the speed of my PC, with it's 'inferior' AMD Athlon 64 +3200 running at 2.0Ghz.
Intel bet everything on the marketing path: "More GHz = Better" when they went with the P4. They went with deep pipelines that could process data chunks quickly. This is why P4s used to (and maybe still do) beat AMDs at benchmarks for multimedia applications, since these are just straight number crunching. For decision making (general programming, AI, etc.) the deep pipelines are a detriment, since the processor has to guess the correct branches and flush if wrong. The deep pipeline latency kills the performance in these cases. AMD took a long term approach, and made their cores so that they could be easily scalable, and are now taking advantage with the smaller gate sizes. This also helps them with power consumption. Intel has a long road now to catch up. I'm an AMD fanboy, but I want Intel to remain competitive, because competition means consumers win.