In my opinion both AMD and Intel have their own advantages and disadvantages.

In Intel's case, the Core 2 and the offers excellent execution units but their potential cannot be shown thanks to the archiac GTL bus which serverely hinders data transfers.

AMD however with their Hypertransport bus and intergrated memory controller offers pretty good performance so there is less reliance on large caches which is probaly why AMD processors are cheaper. However, the intergrated memory controller means that when a new generation of memory is coming out, it means that there is usually a longer wait for a new processor with a new memory controller that can use the new memory.

I would wait for Intel to bring out its CSI bus and for the quad cores to become offered in standard processors instead of the Extreme and Xeon versions, which should be later this year.


R@nSiD > 'The Nano jump is beyond huge, its mamoth. It will lead the way for smaller faster and more quiet components.'

Faster components likely, quieter (and cooler) probaly not. Since 45 nm is a huge leap from 65, Intel probaly wants to push clock rates towards 5 GHz, considering that IBM is doing the same thing with its POWER6. Anyways, I don't know why quiet computers are so popular, I like my workstation and the loud jet like noise it makes.