It seems in recent times the majority both here and in the marketplace have liked AMD on the desktop and Intel on the laptop. This week each company has hit back at their weak area with major product announcements:

Intel has announced its brand new "Core 2 Duo" processor line for the desktop promising 40% faster and 40% lower power consumption. This leap frogs AMD. However, AMD hinted it has an upcoming major announcement of its own for the desktop later this month so stay tuned.

AMD announced its Turion 2 mobile processor; it matches Intel's performance, dual cores, and max power consumption so no big deal yet. The kicker is it claims to use less power than Intel when running on batteries due to enhanced sleep states (an area it used to lag behind in). It also still holds a critical edge in that it is a 64-bit processor, something Intel plans to answer late in the 3rd quarter in its mobile lineup. A 64-bit cpu is a must if you want to upgrade to 64-bit Windows Vista next year or you want many gigs of RAM.

If both manufacturers claims hold up (they still need validated in the real world), it is worth looking more closely at Intel on the desktop and AMD in the notebook space. And look for price cuts on existing technologies to make way for the new. Competition is great.

Just read that AMD is planning to release a 4 core CPU pretty soon...

I've never really felt that either intel or AMD is the fastest, just depends on what you gonna use your PC for.

Intel has always beaten AMD in video processing tasks, while AMD remains unbeaten in the gaming applications...

4 cores by both Intel and AMD will be a reality next year. As to whether it will benefit anybody, that remains to be seen.

For anyone considering Intel duo core desktops, the older 805 dual core (2.4ghz) is a good bargain. It has been successfully overclocked to 4+Ghz using water cooling (3.7ghz using air). It's a steal at around 5,000 baht.

The new "core" processors have been available in the US for quite a few months, but have only started appearing in Thailand the past few weeks, and only for the 930 (3Ghz) part.