The performance difference isnt much, depends on what your doing, the price for AMD is alot cheaper though. Overclock and AMD and you get some sizable gains in some areas. Neither offer whats needed in some ways. Id like to see a 2.5-3Ghz CPU with a massive cache, like 4mb or better, it would help alot with what I do. The AMD's I have while fast are like a little sports car, its fast till you put anykind of a load on it, then it chokes. The Intel's in the same class are slightly better about that but cost twice as much. I'd like to see both makers dump some of the instruction sets too, most of it is a waste. If your running windows you often get penalized right from the start because it uses precompiled binaries which usually arent compiled with AMD in mind.