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The P4 Northwood/Prescott beats Athlon XP, but Athlon 64 beats all consumer X86 procs especially in gaming. Just take a look at any article over at anand or firingsquad and you'll see what I mean.
Since it is very easy to find performance numbers I'm not going to go into that any more than I have but I will go into slightly more technical aspects of the processors, mainly comparing LGA775/late end 478 against K8 based cpu, since K7 is a good deal slower than either. With the K8 AMD brought 64bit extensions and on die memory controllers to consumer level processors and workstations. The on die memory controller is where the K8 really works it's magic, it was also designed for dual core CPUs so the hypertransport doesn't have to split bandwith between the two cores as the FSB based Intel chips will have to. Both the newcastle and clawhammer are a little over 100 million transistors, but still significantly lower than either Prescott or Gelation cores, while still being about twice the transistor count of Northwood. Heat output on the Newcastle/Clawhammer cores is significantly less than a Prescott but still slightly hotter than a northwood. One of the biggest problem with Intel's Prescott core is that Intel's 90nm process isn't perfectected resulting in leaky transistors. Intel is also having problems fabbing and scaling there chips while AMD is plowing on ahead. Intel's flagship P4 (3.6GHZ prescott) infact has not shipped yet despite being slated for a late June release because yields are so low on proccessors that can hit that frequency while idling below 70C (I kid you not, these chips were idling this hot when they were sent out to reviewers, infact one reviewer couldn't keep it from going into heat induced shutdown using the stock heatsink). THey are also having problems getting ships to scale past 3.6 GHZ. Something that you should also think about is the MHZ increase each new iteration of the core recieves, both recieve a 200MZ boost currently however a 200MHZ boost to a prescott has much less efect than a 200MHZ boost to a newcastle or clawhammer. It is never good to be playing catch up in terms of performance and that is exactly what Intel is doing, Intel was hoping that LGA775 would give them a boost by having DDR2 and PCIE but if anything it's slower and hotter than S478 which means slower and hotter than Athlon 64, meanwhile Nvidia and Via are about to release PCIE SLI chipsets for Athlon 64 which would put them ways ahead of a competing P4 rig.
In short there is basically no reason to go Intel at the moment and most knowledgable people will corroborate this. BTW Athlon 64 is the fastest 32bit processor line. It's amazing how much BS there is about how Athlon 64 procs don't do 32bit when infact they are the fastest 32bit procs and they just happen to support 64bit extesions also. Btw don't try to dispute the fact that they are 32/64 because I'm using a Athlon 64 right now in 32bit windows.
Since it is very easy to find performance numbers I'm not going to go into that any more than I have but I will go into slightly more technical aspects of the processors, mainly comparing LGA775/late end 478 against K8 based cpu, since K7 is a good deal slower than either. With the K8 AMD brought 64bit extensions and on die memory controllers to consumer level processors and workstations. The on die memory controller is where the K8 really works it's magic, it was also designed for dual core CPUs so the hypertransport doesn't have to split bandwith between the two cores as the FSB based Intel chips will have to. Both the newcastle and clawhammer are a little over 100 million transistors, but still significantly lower than either Prescott or Gelation cores, while still being about twice the transistor count of Northwood. Heat output on the Newcastle/Clawhammer cores is significantly less than a Prescott but still slightly hotter than a northwood. One of the biggest problem with Intel's Prescott core is that Intel's 90nm process isn't perfectected resulting in leaky transistors. Intel is also having problems fabbing and scaling there chips while AMD is plowing on ahead. Intel's flagship P4 (3.6GHZ prescott) infact has not shipped yet despite being slated for a late June release because yields are so low on proccessors that can hit that frequency while idling below 70C (I kid you not, these chips were idling this hot when they were sent out to reviewers, infact one reviewer couldn't keep it from going into heat induced shutdown using the stock heatsink). THey are also having problems getting ships to scale past 3.6 GHZ. Something that you should also think about is the MHZ increase each new iteration of the core recieves, both recieve a 200MZ boost currently however a 200MHZ boost to a prescott has much less efect than a 200MHZ boost to a newcastle or clawhammer. It is never good to be playing catch up in terms of performance and that is exactly what Intel is doing, Intel was hoping that LGA775 would give them a boost by having DDR2 and PCIE but if anything it's slower and hotter than S478 which means slower and hotter than Athlon 64, meanwhile Nvidia and Via are about to release PCIE SLI chipsets for Athlon 64 which would put them ways ahead of a competing P4 rig.
In short there is basically no reason to go Intel at the moment and most knowledgable people will corroborate this. BTW Athlon 64 is the fastest 32bit processor line. It's amazing how much BS there is about how Athlon 64 procs don't do 32bit when infact they are the fastest 32bit procs and they just happen to support 64bit extesions also. Btw don't try to dispute the fact that they are 32/64 because I'm using a Athlon 64 right now in 32bit windows.
