Are you beginning to see the trend here? The Athlon's bus cannot take advantage of some very important, new technologies and it just makes me wonder how things will change once manufacturers start releasing DDR400, dual-channel chipsets for the Pentium 4. Even today we are seeing Intel's current fastest processor, the Pentium 4 2.4GHz outperform AMD's fastest processor, the AthlonXP 2100+ (1.73GHz) by a significant margin. Going by this fact and the facts stated earlier in the article, it is logical to say that by moving the Pentium 4 to a 533MHz FSB and giving it faster memory, Intel will only be increasing their performance lead even further.

That said, at the moment it is clear to see who the leader of the high-end processor market is as far as value for money is concerned. AMD's AthlonXP processor provides performance that surpasses that of the Pentium 4 clock-for-clock and it is also priced much cheaper.

What does this all mean? Well, until now, AMD's AthlonXP has been the undisputed leader of the desktop market, offering higher performance than the Pentium 4 and also being sold at a cheaper price. However, things are finally starting to change, with Intel stealing the performance crown from AMD and not looking like it is going to hand it back any time soon. With the Pentium 4 dropping in price every month, AMD seems to be running out of cards to play unless they manage to pull off something special and steal the performance crown back from Intel.

Could this be the end of AMD's reign as the king of the high-end desktop processor market? Are AMD going to be left behind and in the end, regarded as a value processor? As you would have already figured out from the tone of this article, I think so. It's just a matter of waiting to see if chipset manufacturers decide to release a dual-channel, DDR400 chipset for the Pentium 4, and if Intel can manage to competitively price their future processors.

There are going to be some exciting times ahead and you can rest assured that TweakTown will keep you up to date on the latest happenings in the chip war between AMD and Intel. As I said earlier, some of the views expressed in this article are quite controversial and I'm not expecting everyone to feel the same way. However, if you have any comments or questions please feel free to talk about them in the forums.