Uh oh! Here we go! En Garde!

Quote Originally Posted by Xiahou
In terms of pure performance yes, but in terms of value, it's debatable.
I don't agree, Intel is pound for pound, almost as cheap as AMD, AND you also have almost a guaranteed .5ghz overclock on the cpu with stock cooling no matter what. Once you take that into account, I think Intel has a significant lead on AMD right now (unfortunately) in terms of price, performance, and overall value.

I always just go to the benchmarks whenever I'm looking to buy hardware. Figure out how much you're willing to pay and find out what will get you the most bang for your buck. I usually start with Tom's Hardware, since they make easy to read charts that can compare a wide variety of CPUs at a glance.
Ugh, not Tom's Hardware. They're so biased it's not even funny, I stopped reading their reviews years ago. Intel basically owns them.

The top of the heap is pretty much dominated by Intel chips, so if you want top of the line speeds with no compromises go with Intel. However, if you look at top of the line AMDs and compare them with similarly performing Intel CPUs, the AMD chips are substantially cheaper than their Intel counterparts. So, if you want good performance without emptying your bank accounts, AMD is a reasonable choice.
Again disagree, due to the inherent fact that even our grandmothers can overclock a C2D or C2Q and get 10-25%+ more performance with little to no effort. AMD chips suck more power and run hotter right now, and the triple core CPUs are a joke as I understand. It's basically a quad core with one processor disabled, because they couldn't get true quad to work in a stable manner.

YMMV, IMO, etc. I wouldn't go with AMD at all right now, not until they've got some time to really get back into the game.