Even though AMD has come out with the FX-74 and FX-70, looks like the Core-2 duo is still beating AMD out in worldbench scores. For a while, AMD was king, but it looks like Intel has regained it's leading edge and is holding on. This is good for competition. AMD needs to come up with something other than inproving and tweaking older model chips. Personally I have used AMD for a while, but with pricing being highly competitive these days, my next system is very likely going to be intel based. Right now, you're getting more bang for the buck with the new Core 2 Duos.

I've owned AMD chips since the 1Ghz Thunderbird, and built exclusively AMD based systems since. Until I got a good deal on a Pentium D I built for my aunt, and then a Core2Duo for myself.

I'm fairly happy with it, but there is no noticible change in feel or responsiveness in anything outside of games and benchmarks over my 754 Athlon64 2800+ in XP.

I think the biggest bang for the buck in performance for games is the GPU (s). CPU speed factors little after a certain point....

AMD is coming out with quad cores.... This is becoming an interesting development. We could see some very real artificial intelligence on the home computing level in a few years using nodal processing. Each CPU or core is a node in itself and interacts with the other nodes like a neural network.

It's been a concept for a long time and generally replicated in labs only with supercomputers and/or sophisticated software.

The biggest development I hope for, is the ability to run single threaded apps on multiple cores. That, would crown an instant king.