Thanks xStainDx for posting this in BPN, its a review of the AMD Athlon 64 Performance. Heres a snip from the review:
When Athlon processors came out in 1999, the competition in the processor market became much worse. The progressive architecture of this CPU allowed AMD to prove a worthy competitor to Intel and to give them quite a lot of causes for concern. The company"s processors didn"t yield to Intel"s solution in performance, and sometimes were even faster than those. However, it has become quite a hard task for AMD lately to retain this parity with Intel. During Athlon"s architecture life-time Intel managed to shift from Pentium III architecture to absolutely new Pentium 4 architecture, and then enhanced it significantly by increasing the L2 cache size and speeding up the system bus. Athlon also underwent certain enhancements, although, they never were that drastic. The most AMD did, included only system bus overclocking, L2 cache size increase, implementation of SSE support. As a result, Intel is now somewhat ahead of the competitor: Pentium 4 working frequencies grow very rapidly, while AMD has reached the top of Athlon architecture potential.If you want to see a summary of the conclusion go here or you can just read the whole article ;)