"Sexy one" writes:
Most people these days need nothing more than a $50 AMD cpu. Spending
hundreds or even a thousand more for some Intel cpu's is just a waste of
money.

I agree with you

Me too.

I've got an Intel core2 machine at work, and a phenom I machine at home,
and I've benchmarked my most important number-crunching app.

Normalizing the clock speeds, a single core of the core2 is maybe 5-10%
faster clock-for-clock, for pure cpu-crunching using this app (much of
that may be due to the cache size; this core2 has an _enormous_ L2
cache). The core2 _also_ has a faster clock, so overall it's pretty
fast (the phenom has double the number of cores though, so which is
better depends on the situation).

However -- for typical usage (running web browsers, editors, etc), the
phenom _system_ feels far speedier and more responsive. Chiefly, I
think this is because it has more memory, and is much faster at I/O (I'm
not entirely sure why; the hard disks are from the same manufacturer,
and of the same generation, but the difference is quite amazing). The
core2 system, despite the speedy little cpu, often feels like a bit of a
dog, really.

Small differences in cpu speed/efficiency matters to some people, but in
most cases, it's just one factor among many to consider when buying a
system.

-Miles

--
We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
-Oscar Wilde