The Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe) and Woodcrest unfortunately totally blow the AMD's out of the water. In all benchmarks the E6400 clocks in just below or right at AMD's FX-62 flagship processor (the E6400 is the 2.13GHz Conroe, which in price point is pretty much equivalent to the 4200+ or the 4600+). And with how cool the Conroe's run, you can easily overclock them. I just bought one to replace my AMD, and it runs at around 33 degrees C, about 27 degrees C down from my AMD.
The real advantage comes from Intel using only one die with two cores on it, instead of AMD which has two dies, each with one core. Firstly, this allows one core to use all 2MB of L2 Cache (standard on the Conroe's, some even have 4), whereas AMD only allows you to use whatever cache is on the die (most likely 512KB or 1MB). The two cores per die design also means that information going from one core to the other can now transfer across the die, resulting in less circuitry, better performance, and a cooler chip. Intel is also using 65nm technology, whereas AMD uses 90nm technology.
So not only are Intels chips faster and cooler, but their more technologically advanced than AMDs. While the K8L's may catch AMD back up to Intel, we will likely see Intel as the new dual core chip king until quad core processors come out (Quarter 2 2007). I'll be doing benchmarks on my new system soon, as well as overclocking my E6400 Core 2 Duo, and comparing them with the benchmarks for my old AMD system, so we can see a direct comparison (all the hardware is the same except the motherboard and processor)  .
Alex |