I've been failing to see any new chips coming from AMD, while Intel is cranking along.

AMD has lowered the price of their chips, making it kinda tempting but how are they compared to new intel chips?

AMD Athlon 64 X2
Dual core, 3GHz
HT: 2000MHz
L1 Cache: 128KB+128KB
L2 Cache: 2 x 1MB
90nm
$169.99

Intel Core 2 Duo E6850
Dual core, 3GHz
FSB: 1333MHz
L1 Cache: 32KB+32KB
L2 Cache: 2x 2MB
65nm
319.99 fscking dollars!

What I'm wondering, how does the HT and FSB compare? If intel had a 2000MHz FSB would it be the same as a 2000MHz hypertransport?

Less L1 cache, more L2 cache...

Intel, I want price drops, a CSI, and SMT!
^^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem...rchitecture%29 :P

In my experience AMD outperforms Intel. If Intel is better now it isnt by much and certainly doesnt justify the price difference.

In college I had a 2.4ghz Intel chip while my roommate had a 2.2ghz AMD chip (I dont remember the exact specs, but it was less than mine) his chip outperformed mine in every benchmark we ran except for a few. The places where I outperformed him were very small differences while his blew me away in other categories. I also had newer faster RAM than he did, so I was a little puzzled considering my chip cost nearly twice his...

Anything based on NetBurst really sucks, hard.

AMD beats Intel up in price-for-performance until the 4200+/4400+s. Past that point, you can get a E4300 (IIRC it's 135$) so for the minimal investment it's a big bang. At the lower end, from what my friends tell me the E2140/60 are nothing noteworthy, and an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ EE is better, generally because a good AM2 motherboard with an nVidia or VIA chipset is something like 90$, whilst an Intel one is 110$+.

Performance-wise, the Core 2 Duo solidly beats the Athlon 64 X2, but by little. (IIRC, you get like 5 extra frames-per-second in shooters, and encoding is around 15-45 seconds faster) For the price, I'd go AMD, but Intel has the advantage of better drivers. I'm not too sure about HyperTransport and FSB. From what I recall, they are different, FSB being dictated by the motherboard, and HyperTransport being general speed to the RAM & various ports.

OK, Pentium wasn't a real match for AMD but their Core 2 Duos are a completely different story. They beat AMD across the board. Then again, AMD has been workinig its prices and I'm not suprised that recent statistics show that they are gradually regaining some market share. Anyway, I'm curious to see how Barcelona will compare to Phenom.