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To the masses, the processor in the machine barely matters. Decisions are now made strictly on the marketing blitzes made by the likes of Dell, HP, Alienware, Acer, and other lesser-known competitors. People rarely say ‘I want a Pentium’ – they say I want a Dell. This is sad for AMD – because now they finally have a processor that is hands-down superior to Intel… and the masses will never care.

For those of us that still care what’s inside – and about how much performance we can get from a machine, check out this great review of the latest Dual Core releases from AMD and Intel. AMD is late to the party in terms of marketing, but now they can definitely say they have a superior product.

This sums it up:

What we’re looking at here is a clean sweep. We can find a couple of edge cases – mostly synthetic benchmarks – where Intel’s dual-core desktops outpace AMD’s new Athlon 64 X2. We’re more concerned with real applications, and when it comes to those, we have a hard time finding any situation where a dual-core Pentium comes out ahead of a dual-core Athlon 64. Even in most single-threaded apps, AMD takes the cake. Games are an absolute blow-out, with the Athlon 64 X2 handily outstripping even a liquid-cooled Extreme Edition dual-core Pentium overclocked by 25%. And it’s not just games: The X2 beat the massively overclocked Pentium in DivX encoding and LightWave rendering, and basically tied it on the 3ds max SPEC APC test.