Just a simple example of P4 vs. Athlon XP. I chose older chips simply because they are cheap and the benchmarks were easy to find. If I knew which P4 was being considered, I could provide more relevant benchmarks. Also, keep in mind that the prices of these chips have decreased significantly since this article was written (2002). http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=45000289 "Knowing that a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 costs $562 and that an Athlon XP 2000+ (on average slightly faster) comes with a $339 pricetag, it is crystal clear that the Athlon is still the king in the price/performance department." Here's an article with some possibly more useful benchmarks: http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=914&page=4 The cheapest you can currently get this P4 (based on search of pricegrabber.com) is $110 US. The cheapest you can get the Athlon is $60 US. Therefore, you get the following price/performance ratios based on the last review: CPU Bench Athlon: 77.25 MIPS/$ P4: 35.48 MIPS/$ (Dhrystone) Athlon: 38.68 MFLOPS/$ P4: 9.59/22.5 MFLOPS/$ (Whetstone) Multimedia Bench Athlon: 151.68 it/s/$ P4: 72.57 it/s/$ (Int) Athlon: 177.88 it/s/$ P4: 89.02 it/s/$ (Float) Memory Bench Athlon: 33.57 MB/s/$ P4: 9.57 MB/s/$ (Int) Athlon: 31.72 MB/s/$ P4:9.56 MB/s/$ (float) That's an average of 2.85 performance/price increase of this AMD chip over the P4!! Now obviously if we get more expensive processors we might have lower or higher benchmarks/$ depending on how far up the line we go. I would be more than willing to look into which processor would provide us the best performance/price if people are interested.

On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 11:02:20PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote: Plus, y'know, Intel may be The Man in this comparison, but AMD is The Other Man. -- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]