after all their clock speeds are only in the low 2ghz still

even the 64 bit chips

Clock speed doesn't matter much, since a AMD Athlon 64 with a 2.0GHz clockspeed outperforms Intel Pentium 4's with 3.2GHz clockspeeds in the vast majority of benchmarks. My AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.08GHz) outperforms Intel Pentium 4's at 2.8GHz, and matches or exceeds the performance of Pentium 4's at 3.0GHz. Note that I am talking about Northwood core Pentium 4's when compared to my Athlon XP- I haven't seen any benchmarks between mine and a Prescott P4.

Or, look to the mac world. A G5 at 2.0GHz will outperform everything except Athlon FX processors and the new high-end Socket 939 Athlon 64's. G5 at 2.5GHz is between an Athlon 64 4000+ at 2.4 GHz and an Athlon FX-55 at 2.6GHz

That's because AMD processors are more more efficient, performing more operations than Intel equivalents in the same number of cycles. If you compare equivalent processors, Intel outperforms AMD in areas like MP3 encoding, while AMD wins in other areas. Overall Intel are generally more powerful than their AMD equivalents, but AMD processors provide much better price to performance ratio. I have an AMD64 3200 at 2.2GHz and, even in 32-bit mode, it pisses on an Intel processor with a 50% faster clock speed.

Not to mention the obscenely long pipeline on Intel processors. And the idiot-child that is HyperThreading. Honestly...

Heh, someone got hooked by Intel's propaganda (which is biting them in the ass right now, anyway). :D

Short answer: Yes. Look at benchmarks. AV encoding is Intel's specialty, but AMD wins pretty much everywhere else, and is catching up to Intel in the encoding department. Oh, and they put out less heat, which is nice.

Onoz! My megahurtz haev been stoled!

omgwtf h4x

Hyperthreading has it's uses, and you can disable it.

A64 is just overall better than the P4 Prescott. Prescott wins in encoding (most of the times...).

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/athlon64-90nm_9.html

In (1) you can see that a 2.0GHz Athlon 64 ties a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition gaming-wise. In (2) you can see the Athlons winning in Premier and Photoshop. In (3), the Athlons win a compiler test and rendering benchmarks. In (4), you can see the Socket 939 processors outperforming the Pentiums on different types of media encoding, except on the Intel-optimized DivX version.

1. http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2249&p=9
2. http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2249&p=7
3. http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2249&p=12
4. http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjI2LDM=

I'll attest to HT's advantages.

If you've got a P4, and an AMD sitting right beside each other, get FRAPS and fire up Vendetta.

The P4 records flawlessly with _no_ slowdown whatsoever, due to HT, The AMD box will slow to nearly a crawl, because it's got two heavy threads at the same time, and it really cant balance well between the two.

Thats more to do with a crappy scheluder in your OS than with the CPU though.

Its a generally accepted fact right now that amd64 is stomping ass in the x86 market, and in 64bit mode the benefits are even greater, remember a majority of benchmarks are run on windows, which is either completely 32bit, or mostly 32bit with some 64bit chunks(the 64bit xp)

In the game armagetron the difference between 32bit mode and 64bit mode was huge, with 32bit getting me around 350fps and 64bit pullin 1000fps

http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/res2004q4/

As good as any other benchamrk you care to trust. The real test of a system is when you USE it!