If you are looking at any of the P4 chips prior to the P7 than I would agree with you...however the P7 introduced a new archetecture that makes the chip out-perform comparable K7 chips.
As for gaming issues...because a chips Mhz is faster doesn't necessarily mean the chip is faster for your game. This is where AMD makes a statement. This statement is true, however again..that statement was made prior to the launch of the P4 1.7mhz chip.
When you look at the mere 60+ dollar difference...their is no comparison in the two chips. If AMD wants to continue to pursue the market as they had in the past they will need to get their chips back to the original 30 - 40% less than pentium prices.
I had AMD's and Cyrix chips for a long time running side by side with Pentinum chips...and a couple of things I noticed over the years...
1. Intels chips lasted longer (life wise) than the AMD and especially longer than the ever frying Cyrix chip.
2. Intels chips never conflicted with any hardware or software...try putting a WG 8port hub in a Cyrix or AMD system...BLAH nightmares! among many other networking hardware pieces....this is why all MAJOR corps go with Intel. If Intel and AMD or Cyrix where in the same league then all the big corps would go with them...It would save them a BUNDLE...
Fact is AMD is still proving itself...they make a good product..it needs to get better and faster on the Mhz side if they want to compete with Intel. Cyrix is almost out of the game...(i believe they are even under new ownership). Intel will continue to dominate because AMD is getting better. If it were not for AMD Intel's chips would never get better...
Bottom Line - You want to buy AMD to support the cause...go ahead.....I did and will probably again. But if the price is only a few dollars....my butt is buying the Intel all day long. Its like arguing the difference between a Lexus and a Toyota...same car...same car company...but the lexus is soo much sweeter.....and so is the Intel.
Intel P7 Spec Info:
Introductory 1.4GHz. and 1.5GHz. Clock Speed with roadmap to 2GHz. and beyond
400MHz. "Quad Pumped" System Bus
"Hyper Pipelined" Technology - 20 stage pipeline depth for greater frequency capability
"Rapid Execution Engine" - ALUs run at twice the speed of the core frequency
256K L2 Advanced Transfer Cache running at core processor speed
8K L1 Data Cache
Execution Trace Cache - Caches decoded Micro-Ops readying them for execution
Advanced Dynamic Execution - More efficient speculative out of order execution unit feeding execution engines
Enhanced Branch Prediction Capability - Compensates for the deeper pipeline's higher likelihood of mis-predicted branches
Streaming SIMD Extension 2 (SSE2) - 144 New instructions including 128bit SIMD Integer Arithmetic and 128bit double precision floating point instructions in addition to SSE and MMX instructions.
[ 12-17-2001: Message edited by: Cyan ]
