I myself would choose intel because they havent been cheating the benchmarks.....
I do have a p4 2.0ghz and a xp2200 and the p4 crushes it...
AMD is not better, by far
AMD = Ferrai
INTEL = School Bus
Think about it carefully....the ferrari can only carry 2 people, well actually 1 person, since the drive....at 200mph
The bus can carry 75 people at a top speed of 70mph....
Are you getting the picture.....slowly....
Intels old architecture has a 31 stage pipeline, which is the school bus....
When there is somesort of write dependency, it has to hold 31 processes....
But as you can see, that the throughput is greater after it gets going........
So itll start out slow and then speed up dramatically.
The amd will give you usually constant speed, and thats why its better for games currently....
With intel's core, they are cutting the pipeline stages in half and adding a four execution units.......
This new core will completely crush anything AMD will release for a couple years....
At least Intel wasnt found out to be cheating benchmarks.......
For referece, the were found cheating with their XP estimates.....the 2000+ was nowhere near as fast as the p4 2.0....and they got busted on new benching progs....
PPC got busted recently....trying to get Apple back with rigged benches....
Yes, you can actually make a processor to detect a benchmark so it will skip ahead and give fake benching scores....
Also, I do own an AMD64....well actually there is no such thing as AMD64....its IntelArchitecture32EXT....yes thats right.....fake 64 bits ISA.....
The only true IA64 is the ITANIUM.....
If you want the ultimate multipurpose processor, get an intel Itanium 2.....
Oh...by the way, intel makes the architecture that AMD uses, so the dollar always stops at intel....no matter what you buy...