INTEL'S DESKTOP PROCESSORS HAVE NOT been in a good place for the past two and a half years. Pentium 4 and Pentium D CPUs have run at relatively high clock speeds but delivered relatively low performance compared to their competition from AMD. They've also drawn a tremendous amount of power, which they've generously expended as heat. In other words, they've been hotter than Jessica Simpson and slower than, well, Jessica Simpson. Despite heroic efforts by Intel's engineering and manufacturing types, these chips based on the Netburst microarchitecture haven't been able to overcome their inherent limitations well enough to keep up with the Athlon 64.



Link: TechReport