That's the whole thing about benchmarking now. Intel and AMD have taken different approaches to how CPU's handle work. A P4 using a program that is optimized for SSE-2 and with HT active will certainly kick an Athlon's ass. But 96% of the software out there doesn't know what either of those thing are. Most code is still plain old X86, with SSE, 3D-NOW! and other extensions bolted on. Without those, you get into the meat of the design philosophy. Clockspeed isn't the easy win issue it once was, anymore than engine RPM means jack. If you don't have a properly designed torque converter and transaxle, you might have a 20 cylinder gold plated monster that can sustain 12,000 RPM's but a stock Yugo could still outdrag you. AMD has been keeping pace, performance-wise, with Intel since it reclaimed the clockspeed crown, with design philosophy; namely the length and width of the pipe, the design of the prefetch, branch predictor, and cache controlling logic. And the XP-3200+ isn't a 'faster' chip. It's a better chip, that does more on less cycles per second. As for the Itanium vs. the Xeon, I believe the former has a much larger L1 and L2 cache. The less you have to go to the external buses, the 'faster' an operation becomes.