what ther overall best cpu

Semi objective, I say 939 Athlon64 3000+.

Good price per performance (not da best though).
Good chipsets and motherboards support.
Good overclockability.
Good upgradability (the SLI and 64 bit OS in mind).
Low power consumption.
Heat problemless.
AMD has shown very well growth, even some has predicted that 2005 will be AMD's not Intel's.
I personally like AMD who hardly changed the processor socket, unlike Intel.

But no DDR2 support in the next few months (the price is still too high anyway).
Slightly weaker on 3D design and decoding multimedia performance than the competitor.
No SSE3 (significant?).
No Hyper Threading (in some occasions, it's preferable though).
No "Intel Inside" thing (someone consider it important).
Cannot use it to fry egg - just kidding. ^^

Are you saying in Latin America that for servers, Intel is widely available, but few choices for AMD?

If so, could be due to smaller production quantities at AMD, and after all orders are filled, there is not enough to saturate Latin market with them, but Intel has much larger production facilities, hence, Intels are widely available.

<pre><font color=red>°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°`°¤o \\// o¤°`°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°
And the sign says "You got to have a membership card to get inside" Huh
So I got me a pen and paper And I made up my own little sign</pre><p></font color=red>

Are we excluding the FX chips?
Are we talking stock, or OC?
Without FX or EE, I would give the tittle to the winchester 3500. It can OC past what the A64 4000 can, can outperform anything Intel sells in 90% of progs, will run 64 bit like mad, and when Win64 comes out, and progs are 64 bit capable, the last 10% of Intel's wins will go.
Then it has the gaul to do it at 50 watts.
Secondary function as a baseboard heater still goes to prescott.

They are not the same chip. The winchester 3500 is a 90 nano part, while the 4000+ is a 130 nano part.

Intel's "information" is all doublespeak bs.

In DIY Amd is 50%+, as they are in gaming rigs. In general, thier marketshare is close to 20%, and rising slowly.
Amd has 1 fab, Intel has 9?. Intel is the giant. Doing a frontal assault on a giant 10X your size is usually pretty stupid, a good way to get killed.
Amd is partially a well kept secret, because they dont have the facilities to produce the number of chips that the market uses. Dell sells more systems than Amd makes chips.