Roger M asked... > What is the difference between AMD Athlon chips and Intel ones? It > seems to me that there might be a price advantage for the > manufacturers as the AMD seems to be used more on the budget end of > the market, but appears to be gaining ground on Intel.
It's a bit of a "piece of string" question! You're right that AMD seem to have cornered the market a bit at the budget end and you *may* get more bang for your bucks. There are also so many variants these days (Intel alone have dual core, Celeron, mobile etc.) that comparing clock speeds simply doesn't give a true guide. If you hunt you can find performance specs for different chips, but even then the rest of the components are even more important anyway. In my opinion (after 20+ years in IT) most people get too hung up over machine specs. Unless you're seriously into gaming or heavy graphics usage it rarely makes that much difference to real performance - after all you can only type so quickly anyway! I currently have a couple of laptops running 1.4GHz Intel Mobile chips with 512Mb memory, and one with a 1.83GHz Dual Core Intel with 1Gb memory, and there's no real performance difference or any issues apart from occasionally the hard disks - and that's not uncommon with laptops. I would also say that given a choice of extra memory or a faster processor I would always go for the memory option. Glen
