THERE´S NO LOVE LOST between the Intel and AMD camps these days. Both sides know they´re in for the fight of their lives, and both are bringing spectacular advances to the desktop PC market with regularity. The latest salvos in the desktop wars are a whole new microarchitecture from Intel and a revamped Athlon platform from AMD. If you´ve not had the chance to do so yet, read up on these technologies in our review of the AMD 760 chipset with DDR SDRAM and our Pentium 4 review. We´ve already painted much of the backdrop for this article, and now it´s time for the main event: The P4 and Athlon DDR in a head-to-head, take-no-prisoners benchmark brawl.

We´ve rounded up a 1.5GHz P4 system from Intel and tossed it into the ring with a 1.2GHz DDR system from AMD. To test our contenders´ mettle, we´ve run them through a grueling gauntlet of benchmarks, from the highly synthetic to in-the-mud, real-world application tests.