Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[sgolds]

yourbankruptcy, that's not really what the article said. Rather, it asserts that some software will not run any faster (per clock) on Prescott, other software will:

http://www.aceshardware.com/

This means that some software will not run - clock for clock - faster on the Prescott than on the Northwood P4.
...
The software where Intel is already doing well such as Lightwave, Cinema4d and 3DSMax, will show the Prescott being faster clock for clock than Northwood. With two or more threads, the extra L2-cache space will be put to good use.

It looks more and more that Prescott will be a mixed bag (a far cry from the killer product some expected). Prescott seems to be a faster design than Northwood, but my gut sense from the articles of the past few months is that AMD will maintain an overall performance edge this year, certainly for the first half and probably for the second half - depending on 90nm.

The scaling we see with the 3400+ is very encouraging - 8% performance boost for 10% clock rate boost. This implies the architecture has a lot of headroom, and we haven't even seen what socket 939 with unregistered memory can do for AMD.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1426786,00.asp

It's hard not to be impressed by this CPU. Despite being "only a clock frequency boost," the new Athlon 64 3400+ manages to deliver a very good increase in real world performance. We're used to seeing about a 50-60% relationship between clock speed increases and application performance – that is, a 10% speed bump normally nets you 5% or 6% extra performance, if that. With this CPU, the relationship is closer to 80%, sometimes more. Granted, an 8% performance boost doesn't seem like a lot, but it's more than we've come to expect from CPUs that do nothing but step up the clock rate a tick.

No wonder AMD is showing strength against today's down stock market! Delivering the goods on the leading edge of the promised marketing window with better than expected results. :)