September 16, 2009

For years, Intel and AMD have been battling for predominance in the processor/chipset market. AMD's latest plan seems to be to push back on economic grounds -- to offer high-value budget chipsets targeted at the soon-to-be-released Windows 7 systems, and high-performance chipsets that are slightly slower, but much cheaper, than equivalent Intel products. And Intel is firing back.

AMD's new 785G chipset, introduced last month, is designed for the mainstream and budget desktop audience. The 785G ships with drivers designed specifically to work with Windows 7, and several motherboard manufacturers, including Asus, Gigabyte, ECW and MSI, are adopting the 785G chipset to deliver the next generation of motherboards.

AMD's goal was to compete with Intel's G41 chipset, the company's dominant chipset for the value PC market segment which launched in June 2008. But in this ever changing game of leap frog, Intel quickly came back with the introduction of the P55 chipset and the Core i5 family of CPUs.

Which offers the most bang for the buck? I decided to find out by pitting AMD's new 785G chipset against Intel's G41 and P55 chipsets. I also took a look separately at AMD's Phenom II, a high-performance processor that sacrifices a little of that performance to save some significant dollars.

Source:-http://www.computerworld.com