Im building a new computer that will be just for programming (PHP,Java,C++) and some gaming. I was wondering if there are any advantages of AMD over Intel for this application?

I think AMD CPUs are a better value for most uses, including yours. You could ask in the hardware forum, but from what I understand, AMDs perform better for games/3D, and Intel has a slight speed advantage for raw power stuff like floating point calculations. The only advantage Intel might have is hyperthreading, which can act like SMP, giving better multitasking performance. I don't think it's worth it, especially considering the performance increase we can expect in Linux 2.6.

Yeah unless you have cash to burn AMD is usually the more sensible choice. I've seen some kernel compiling benchmarks that show the top of the line Pentium 4s barely coming out on top, and you know how expensive those mothers are. Usually AMD will outperform a chip of similar (or slightly higher) speeds by Intel.

"AMDs perform better for games/3D, and Intel has a slight speed advantage for raw power stuff like floating point calculations." Actually, it's AMD that has the advantage in floating point heavy apps. Just look at Sciencemark scores for both processors. Intel's raw clockspeed advantage gives the Pentium 4 the upperhand in most games, although it hardly matters at this point in time, as either platform is more than powerful enough for today's games. Overall, the Athlon is a much more efficient processor. In most cases, an Athlon clocked at 2/3 the speed of a Pentium 4 will match or outperform the Pentium 4. Also worth noting is the fact that Ahtlon processors perform *much* better with unoptimized code than the Pentium 4 does.

Is that comparison just by clock speed? Because then AMD would win for almost everything. I guess what I meant was when you compare the AMD model # to the Intel clock speed, AMD will win except in certain cases where the frequency matters more. I could be wrong, though. I don't know either CPU well enough to know which instructions take fewer clock cycles on each and which applications use those instructions the most. I agree about games. GPUs are holding performance back the most.

hi, AMD will be a good choice i think. these p4 processors 're having bugs. ever microsoft recommends AMD for their new strategic games. so u could imagine. performance also very good truly b@bs