Right now, sure, I agree with you that AMD has better CPU's.

If you're gonna argue O/C results, go ahead. I don't do it If that's your basis for argument then you win, since I haven't overclocked since my Celeron 300a.

Stock for stock performance, I always read up on both the latest Intel and AMD offerings whenever I'm purchasing a new system. I don't know if they still do it now, but Sharkyextreme had great guides every few months for Budget/Middle end system buildups, and they'd always offer both Intel and AMD solutions. Last system I bought was a P4 2.4B.. it was cheap over two years ago, and at that time AMD CPU's of similar price weren't any better at all. If you talk overclocking that's a different story...

before that, I bought an AMD Thunderbird 800 MHz. At that time certainly better than the PIII's. In fact I'm using it right now as a Linux-based server, with a 1 GHz CPU now. Before that, Celeron 300a since you could overclock it reliably to 450 MHz, for less than half the price of a PII 450.

Using my own experiences I don't really see that ever changing. Technology is technology.. the company only markets it. What if AMD's best engineers got bought out by Intel? Intel makes a next-gen CPU that kicks the crap out of AMD. Or better yet, they go off and form their own company that kicks the crap out of both AMD and Intel in performance. We as the consumers wouldn't see any of this happen, we'd only see a new company emerge. Would you still buy AMD then?

If I were to buy a new system now, sure I'd piece together an AMD system. But do I think it will always stay like that? Definately not.

Think of it when nVidia beat out 3Dfx. They were the king for a while before ATI stepped up to the plate. It's always nice to have competition