I say nothing.
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The Final Word
It's hard to find flaw with the Athlon XP nowadays. At 1.6 GHz, the Athlon XP is now the fastest all-around processor on the market, giving clear advantages over the Pentium 4 2.0 GHz. Sure, the Athlon and the Pentium 4 both have their applications that they thrive at, but if you look at the big picture, the Athlon is the clear winner in terms of overall performance.
The best part of the Athlon XP 1.6 GHz is the price tag, which as of now is still roughly half of the Pentium 4 2.0 GHz, and looks to stay that way for a while, as it doesn't look like AMD or Intel is planning any major price drops in time for the holiday season. Not only is the bare processor cheaper compared to Intel's, but the companion motherboards and memory are quite a bit cheaper as well, if you're comparing top of the line systems (KT-266A + DDR vs. Intel 850 + RDRAM). It's just a fantastic little package AMD has put together.
Not to mention, the Athlon XP runs in multiprocessor configurations (albeit unsupported), the Pentium 4 doesn't. As Tyan's Tiger MP runs so cheap nowadays, many people are looking at dual Athlons as a serious home computing solution now, which not many people would say about Intel's Pentium 4 Xeon systems.
The Athlon XP certainly isn't perfect though, as it does run quite hot, and needs a pretty decent sized heatsink/fan cooler to keep at normal operating temperatures. Plus, we'd love to see better core protection on the processor itself, to keep overheating and chip-cracking down to a minimum. Still, these aren't major problems in the grand scheme. If AMD would just drop their half-baked processor-numbering scheme, we would be much happier too.
As the Athlon XP will no doubt go past 1.6 GHz, and on to 1.67 and 1.73 GHz most likely, Intel’s is going to have a very tough competitor to beat out. Intel's next-generation "Northwood" processor had better be downright fantastic, because AMD is doing everything right with the Athlon XP.
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