Hmm, just to add further confusion...
I use pentiums at work and whilst I find them to be quite speedy I think that the AMP I have at home seems much quicker.
It might be a bit of an unfair test since there are other factors to take into account, but here at work I have a 2.4G P4 with 256MB RAM at home I have an AMP 2000XP with 512MB ram. the AMD system positivly flys, whilst the intel system horribly chuggs.
Both are completly clean of spyware and virii
The Intel system runs windows 2000 whilst the AMD runs XP.
We also have a set of Duel Xeon machines, they too don't see to have the get up and go of a simmilar AMD based system.
(despite the Hyper threading of the Xeon meaning that the system registers 4 processors - which makes licensing a pane!). and despite the fact that they have over 1Gig of RAM. - they are database servers so you expect them to be slow.
To put it all into perspective, the system at home probably runs faster because it has more memory in it, but if I had gone with the more expensive Pentium option I wouldn't have been able to afford the extra RAM, - catch 22 situation.
Although I have 3 older computers that are running as servers at home they all have 256MB ram and they all have 333Mhz chips, there is a Cyrix, a True pentium and a Celeron, the intel does seem to perform better. though I cannot provide a comparisson with an AMD chip, and those systems are so old that they are practically worthless (both in value and for the purpose of speed comparrison).
Gibant, I can't beleive you threw out a perfectly good chip, you should have at least sold it on ebay! (could have been going into a system near me then!)
