Quote - Its not entirely marketing though, AMDs A64s actually do give the same performance as an equivalent intel of the same rating. ie an athlon 64 3500 gives you close to the performance an intel running at 3.5 GHz would.

It's equivalent of Intel Pentium 4, not intel in general.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 at 1.8GHz is faster than AMD A64 4200+ at 2.2GHz since it's different architecture than Pentium 4 which has pretty inefficient architecture.