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Here's another stupid question I have.  How are AMDs faster since they have a internal oscilator speed almost a ghz slower than Intel.  Does anyone have a simple cut and dry answer for this?

Well this is the best asnwere I could find... so let me get to typing.

It has to do with Data Pipelines, Intel has long pipelines(allowing for higher clock rates) and AMD has shorter pipelines (not allowing a high clock). So data travels a shorter pipeline it takes less time thus comparing to Intel. Now there are other things that affect the speed and performance but I cant give detailed explanaitn of those. Now it is pretty well decided AMD is faster in the games department and Intel in Encoding, this has to do with the pipes.
 If data travels down a pipe in Intel cpu and it went down the wrong pipe it takes a long time to dump the data and send it down the rightpipe, scence Encoding is a fairly predictable thing data does not go down the wrong pipes as often so the higher Ghz gives it a little bit of an edge.
 AMD plays the games because games very unpredictable go down the wrong pipe more often but scence the pipes are shorter it takes less time to find the right pipe. So in short AMD compares because the data going through the CPU has less distance and miss sent data than an Intel chip.

Thats a theory and a pretty good one I think but chip structre is probably also a factor as AMDs FX-55 can reach speeds over 3 Ghz on good cooling and you can bet the farm that 3 Ghz is going to kill any Intel chip at 3 Ghz.

Sounds good to me... And yes, you can bet at least one farm that that CPU would beat an Intel. No trouble!
Dan

Sounds about right.

Also, amd cpu's do more instructions per cycle and have less cycles while intel's more cycles, but less intructions per cycle.

Thats why you have differences in clock frequencies between intel's and amd's flagship cpu's.

also, amd uses socket 939 which has the pins on the CPU.

The intel chips have LGA, land grid array, which means the pins are on the mobo.

There is more difference as well, the architecture between the two types is quite different and they use different instruction sets.

Most of it is over my head, (and I really don't need to understand Hyper Transport Technology to appreciate it!), suffice to say that some very clever electronics are being used, and if you have the fortitude to read about it, you'll see what I mean. Alas, to me, it's just magic tricks  :o