AMD or INTEL

Well ''better'' is really a debatable topic. Intel chips are generally more expensive than their comparable Athlon XP chips. However, Intel chips are significantly faster.

The accessories for AMD chips (motherboards) are generally cheaper as well, in my experience. So, basically, if you want an uber system and have lots of money, go Intel. If you want more bang for your buck, but don''t care about having absolutely cutting edge hardware, go AMD.

Intel is evil. They have like 300 pipeline stages in the P4. You can get P4 performance with an Athlon XP pretty much. I''m just waiting for Athlon XP 64... hook that baby up with UT2003 and Linux...

[  c o d e  m a t r i x  ]

As elendil67 said, the P4 has an instruction pipeline twice the length of the P3 (i think it was twice the length at least, may have been 50% more). So, you can slam more instructions through it, so you get faster output. However, when you come to a JMP instruction - or any other instruction that flushes the pipeline - you loose all the data in the pipeline, and have to refil it, which slows it down.

I prefer AMD because they''re much cheaper, but i think the P4 is still faster.

I never liked Intel either. For the time it looks bad for AMD, I really hope the best to them. If they are removed from the CPU callange the increasement in speed will slow down :/ and that sucks, same with the prices that will then probably go up. We need competition, luckily there''s a big battle at the 3d-front, so nothing to worry about there.

I''m just waiting for the AMD Clawhammer

/MindWipe

People...don''t forgett about 3dNow!!..That''s great stuff..AMD is the chooice for any CS-student!!!

>>which is better the AMD Athalon XP claims that it is 25% better than its p4 counterpart yet still it is cheaper. can someone explain this. WHICH ONE IS BETTER? <<

hz for hz a athlon is faster than a p4 (i think even intel will agree on this)
eg athlon 1.5ghz is faster than p4 1.5ghz (roughly about 20% quicker)

BUT

the p4 comes at higher clock speeds, i believe the highest p4is 3.0ghz + the highest athlon is only 2.2ghz
thus the fastest (consumer) cpu on the planet is a p4 3.0 (its also the most expensive)

generally if money is an issue a athlon is a better choice ( though mb''s are usually more expensive than the intel counterparts)

check www.anandtech.com www.tomshardware.com etc for benchmark comparrisons between the two

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