YB, Re: overclocked cpu's are not what the company is selling. So what? I was talking about technical superiority, not what is in shelves. As you can see Madonion publishes P4 4 Ghz scores, but officially it tops at 3.06. This is because 4 Ghz P4 will need extreme cooling and may have short life. But that's what people use to compare what is faster - Athlon or P4.
I disagree. MadOnion is not the quintessential benchmark for PC consumers. The vast majority of end users don't look at benchmarks at all, and the small percentage that do usually recognize 3DMark as a 3D benchmark, as its name implies - not a CPU benchmark.
Furthermore, CPU overclocking is not a measurement of technical merit for either company. Almost anyone can achieve greater headroom out of stock CPUs, but that doesn't mean those CPUs will ever hit the shelves. It doesn't even mean that most overclockers will reach those frequencies. Since they are top scores on an enthusiast scoreboard, we can assume that exactly one member of that board can achieve such a high score. All others will be somewhat or significantly below that top score. You have to realize that one CPU out of a thousand or a million won't make much of a difference.
For that reason, I consider overclocking as nothing more than a moot discussion. The CPUs currently available on the shelves are going to be the ones that generate revenue. Even if an enthusiast scoreboard is able to boast a small advantage to one side or the other, it won't have much of an affect on actual sales, either now or down the road.
Re: Your point about Hyperthreading completely ignores the fact that Hyperthreading is made to address technical issues specific strictly to P4. Hyperthreading will do almost nothing to Athlon, if implemented, because Athlon don't have those problems that P4 has. Maybe Hyperthreading will give Athlon another 3% of performance, but that's not enough to warrant development.
That was not my point. My point was that Hyperthreading gives an advantage to the Pentium 4, which allows the Pentium 4 to outperform the Athlon is a large number of benchmarks. The benchmarks that I consider significant are those which model real applications, including benchmark suites that use multiple applications. Anandtech uses dozens of these benchmarks, and consistently shows the Hyperthreaded Pentium 4 as having clear leadership above the Athlon. I only expect this gap to widen as more Pentium 4 processors get this feature enabled, and as dual channel DDR platforms with 800MHz FSB support become popular over the next couple months.
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