Single core AMD 3000 is more powerfull than an intel 2.8ghz.
The reason is that AMD has a higher FSB,and the support of hypertransport,which have a great impact on the processor's performance.
Actually, it's a lot more to do with the 12-stage pipelines (lower is better) that can process 3 IPC (higher is better). The Pentium 4's had a 31 stage pipeline that could only process 2 IPC.
the HyperTransport bus does make a difference, but not as much.
Single cores-AMD is more powerfull,and cheaper
Dual cores- Intel is way more powerfull,as the core 2 duo can swipe the X2 in all angles
depends which dual core you're talking about.
Pentium D's were terrible.
AMD's 4600+ > E6300
AMD's 6000+ is roughly equal to an E6600 at stock
E6750 will generally perform better than AMD's CPU's
Q6800 will perform better than AMD's CPU's (but costs far too much)
AMD's upcoming K10 processors will increase their IPC to 4, their FPU's to 128-bit, their HTT bus up to 4GHZ, add 2MB L3 cache, put all four cores on one die sharing the L3 cache, vastly improve the caching and prefetching system, add out of order execution, can skip L3 and L2 cache entirely, and generally get instructions to the core faster.
Quad cores- Intel(for now),as AMD are still working on their opterons after a massive failure.
What failure?
Opterons stole a lot of market share from Xeons.
Future seems bad for AMD...never thought it would happen,lol
see above.