Intel continues to hold onto the overall performance crown as AMD has nothing faster than the Athlon 64 X2 6400+, but the race is a bit closer at lower price points.

The limited production 6400+, albeit more expensive than Intel's Core 2 Duo E6750, ends up underperforming its closest competitor. The Core 2 Duo E6550 is about 5% faster than the Athlon 64 X2 6000+, but honestly the performance advantage isn't large enough to really matter, especially in more realistic GPU-bound scenarios.

The Core 2 Duo E4000 series ends up losing a bit of ground to AMD thanks to having a smaller L2 cache and slower FSB, both of which Episode 2 is particularly sensitive to. The Athlon 64 X2 5600+ is 12% faster than its price-competitor, the Core 2 Duo E4500. It's interesting to note the impact of L2 cache size on performance even in the AMD camp; the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ only has a 512KB L2 per core (vs. 1MB of the 5600+) and performance drops significantly, to the point where it's a toss up between the 5000+ and the Core 2 E4400.

I hate to bag on a local site. It?s not really my thing, you know. I like to accentuate the positive. Fill the world with joy and rainbows. I am known to eat delicious ice cream and smile while I do it.

But I?ve been poking around AMD?s new gaming portal Web site, which, in an inspired bit of branding is called ?AMD GAME!?

It was developed locally by a company called Design Reactor and when you first visit to the site, you see a nice graphic for ?Team Fortress 2.? This is a great game and a very recent one, so you hope that the site will have up-to-the-minute news and other content to keep you coming back.

If they did know gaming they would know that ATI is Canada. This is not a local site. The gaming stuff originates from Cananada.

I'm actually a little surprised IBM isn't already in the console business. The company makes or has a hand in the chips for all three of the newest systems. And Intel has done work on previous game consoles, so it's not like it's a new technology to it, either.

AMD might be another candidate, especially since it now owns graphics-card maker ATI. Since it would be building both the main processor and the graphics card (the two most critical components of any console) in-house, AMD could have unprecedented profit margins on every system it sells.