Well, based on the results that were "revealed" when anand tested the A64 in long mode with XP64 beta, the encoding crown may not be Intel's solely anymore. Aside from that, AMD has definitely decreased the gap (law of dimishing returns in clockspeed) and there's no real dispute about its superiority in business apps and gaming. It amazes me that AMD can make CPU's that are demostrably better than Intel's for the kind of apps a company is looking for, on TOP of that charge significantly less...and still trail by such an enormous margin in corporate desktop market. Oh right, it's all because of Intel's PC subsidiary, Dell. *sigh* I go with whoever has the price/performance crown at the time. (Unless I am building a purpose-specific machine...the 3.0c I have is an encoding machine, and I am building a multi-purpose Dualie Opteron box). Right now, it rests squarely on AMD's Copper interconnect and SOI head. End of last generation, I bought 2 P4C's. My recent purchases looked like this:
1800 x1
2200 x1
2500 Barton (x6...yes, six of them)
2.6C x 2
3.0C x1
A64 2800+ x1