My, how the tables have turned. AMD vs Intel.

My, my, my. It used to be that AMD was the "it" thing to have. (well, maybe not amongst vapid Hollywood social elites. I think Prada still prevails in that category) "You got Intel in your box? WTF!? lolz." Yes, it was a bane for many of us that stuck by Intel. What was even more anoying was trying to explain the performance difference between the two. Yeah, AMD had the best benchmarks from Half Life and a slew of other games. But the shorter pipelines were geared towards that kind of rapid-fire code crunching. AMD could hold a close second, but was never that great for video editing and handling complex jobs in Photoshop. That was where our clunky Intel's truly shined.

Nowadays, Intel's looking not just good, but damn near incredible. When I upgraded to my E6400 Core2Duo, I was blown away. Were the readings from Speedfan accurate? Was my processor truly running under 100ºF? On full load!? Yes, it was. (as reference, my old Pentium 4 ran about 160ºF, which was par for the course) And so the Core2 series became Intel's saving grace, competing neck and neck with AMD across the board. By the time the quad core series began unrolling, Intel had thoroughly stomped AMD. And continues to do so.

Over at PC Perspective they ran AMD's brand spanking new Phenom X4 9850 (2.5 GHz) through the tests. The scores don't look so good against Intel's QX 9x series. In fact, the score look pretty damn dismal.

It wouldn't surprise me really to find out that some of you might not even have known that AMD's Phenom processors had been released. Sure, we had a review up of the technology and have actually done a follow up or two, but to be truthful the new processor from the once-worshiped AMD launched with a thud rather than a bang. The initial launch parts were released at 2.2 and 2.3 GHz, a considerable drop from their expected clock rates and thus performance was poor when compared to anything Intel had n their top-of-the-line Core 2 series.

[...]

The new Phenom X4 9850 processor is a very welcome newcomer to the processor segment and it could be responsible for a rebirth of interest in AMD CPUs. It is far from the fastest CPU was have put through the paces but with the B3 stepping AMD was able to fix the TLB erratum, increase the clock speed to 2.50 GHz and raise memory controller clock rate enough to boost performance across nearly all of our benchmarks. Its price should be attractive to a lot of gamers and enthusiasts as should combining an X4 9850 with a complete Spider platform. Though AMD's components aren't winning the top spot in any of their three markets (CPU, GPU, chipset), they are priced well and perform competitively as a complete solution for real-world gaming and computing making the Spider platform a much more attractive option than it was before.
- Source

Ouch... Basically they're saying that AMD's new chip is cheap and "competitive" with Intel. It used to be that AMD would wipe the floor with Intel on short burst-intensive processing. Obvioulsy, not anymore. Now AMD is trying to simply "stay competitive."

You got AMD in your box? WTTF!? lolz...