It's hard to get really involved when the battle for cpu supremacy is being fought between Nehalem and Barcelona. Even Opteron sounds like a Transformer. Worse still when breaking news leads are being Twittered at you.

Take a leaf out of the WWFs book, or ask any fighting dogs owner advice and start calling your chips something hard, edgy, streetwise. Maybe "The Overtaker" or "The Decimilisator" or maybe Intel could launch the "Cool for School" range of low heat CPUs. Maybe, just maybe, we can move into chip endorsements - "Hi, I'm Chuck Norris and this is the Chuck Norris CPU from Intel. Who cares what it has or does, I'm Chuck Norris and this is my CPU." The Adidas chip could run faster than any other chip, a supermodel could promote the thinnest chip yet and a supreme chess playing monk could endorse the worlds best fpu. The reality of whose chip may or may not benchmark faster than someone elses just doesn't enter into my purchasing equation after all so why not have some fun with these almost-equally-amazing products.

'Intel compared a 3.20GHz Harpertown-based system with a 1600MHz front side bus against a 2.5GHz four-core Opteron-based system on the SPECfp benchmark and found – you guessed it – that the Harpertown box beat the Opteron system by 4 per cent.'

All that extra speed and only a 4% improvement over the opteron, not really that great, plus intel are well know for mangling their benchmarks.

if you look on the twitter next to the http ... ...

you will see a link where you can get the full post

Want to learn more about AMD's Triple Core? Hear it from the source, not to mention what industry analysts like Jim McGregor think: http://tinyurl.com/ysn2eq

The Intel chip at 45nm just about matches and surpasses the AMD chip at 65nm? and this is something to be proud of?

Is it just me who has anyone else spotted that Intels design is therefore so bad that it requires a die shrink and speed upgrade to stay competitive with AMD??

Think you might have misunderstood. The 4% is the benchmark win on the Harpertown's WEAKEST sector against the Opteron.

The whole point of the article is that the Harpertown is expected to trounce the Opteron on other sectors.

Anthony, your post is hilarious. Although your sentence "The reality of whose chip may or may not benchmark faster than someone elses just doesn't enter into my purchasing equation" makes me think you work for Apple marketing department... ;-)

To Anthony,Leroy,Lozzyho

AMEN AMEN & AMEN

700 extra Mhz (an increase of 28% over the 2.5Ghz chip) translates into only 4% extra performance. That's not so great no matter which sector it is.

In any case, my next CPU will be chosen on the basis of energy consumption / performance, not raw benchmarks. Electricity is expensive enough as it is.

I can't find either chip on Ebay...