Both AMD Dual Core Athlon X2 and Intel Dual Core Pentium EE 840 are already hit the market in previous weeks. PC World has just tested both AMD and Intel Dual Core chips and concluded the winner is clearly AMD’s new Athlon 64 X2, which handily outdistanced a dual-core Intel system they tested last month.

Don’t mix up AMD Dual Core Opteron with Athlon X2, same goes to Intel Dual Core Pentium EE 840 with Pentium D. In PC World’s recent tests, they were testing AMD Athlon X2 and Intel Pentium EE 840, the result from the tests is an obvious one. The performance chart clearly shows that PC equipped with AMD’s Dual-Core chip beats Intel’s Dual-Core system.

Quoted:
The AMD machine was the second-fastest we’ve ever tested, with a 116 mark on WorldBench 5, easily surpassing the 95 posted by the 3.2-GHz dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition 840 reference system that we looked at earlier. The unit showed its prowess on the multitasking portion of WorldBench 5. Its time of 6 minutes, 44 seconds was an impressive 3 minutes, 42 seconds faster than the average of two Athlon 64 FX-55 systems, and about 3 minutes faster than the dual-core Pentium EE 840 reference PC’s time.

PC World also highlighted another advantage of upgrading to Athlon 64 which you need only a BIOS upgrade, whereas to convert an Intel unit to dual-core you’ll need to purchase a new motherboard.

As the conclusion, PC World sums up that if you want powerful performance from Athlon X2, you’ll have to pay dearly for it as AMD’s 4800+ chips alone are priced at USD$1001, while Intel’s 3.2-GHz Pentium EE 840 chips currently sell for USD$995.

[Source]