Despite what that article says, AMD is still well ahead in terms of price/performance. However Intel has had a real speed advantage all year and has been slowly expanding it. This is a change from 2001, where Intel had a speed advantage only if you compared absurdly priced / not really available Intel systems to AMD's actually available top systems.

Right now Intel has simply out paced AMD in terms of raw processor speed. AMD is being honest when they mark their new top of the line chip as 2200+, while Intel has chips running up to 2500.

The big question at this point though is where will the ClawHammer fall. The ClawHammer is AMD's next major redesign of the Athlon core, essentially the lesser cousin to the Opteron 64 bit server processor. If the ClawHammer release goes well and ClawHammer based Athlons are actually available by the end of the year, AMD may snatch the speed title back from Intel.

The only hard data I have seen for this is here [link|http://www.tecchannel.de/hardware/937/|tecChannel]. This shows a 800 Mhz ClawHammer prerelease chip matching the performance of a 1.5 Ghz Intel processor. If AMD can actually get this out the door at the rumored speed of 1.6 Ghz, it should match anything up to a 3 Ghz Intel processor at least, possibly more.

Jay