WOW... so much mis-information. True, AMD came a long way from their old XP lines. But the old Sempron 32-bit with the "new" 130nm and 90nm were champs. They overclocked very well and even some managed to match the 64 Athlons. They also managed to be cool as well. However, now the entire AMD line is 64 bit. 64-bit doesnt really do shit for us anyway except servers who can benefit from the memory limit bump. In short, doesnt matter if its AMD's 32-bit or 64-bit line, its the core theyre based on. Anything 130nm or smaller are the newer core with on-die memory controller and that used to rock anything Intel had.
Intel had its fair share of thermal bombs. Dont forget the Prescotts. They still sale those now with a large discount. Also the 8xx Ds are basically two of those bombs stuck together to make a thermal reactor. The 9xx had a die shrunk and manage to be a bit better, but the X2s would whomp on them.
Anyway, fast forward today, processors are more affordable then ever. The AMD Athlon 64 3000+ can be had for as low as $60 and the 3500+ for $90. Those usd to be 150 - 320 repectively. The Pentium 930 Ds were 400, but now can be had for $180. The AMD X2 3800+ was $340 and now you can buy it for $150. In summation, there has been a huge price war among cpu makers so you can buy a very good processor for cheap.
As of right now, if you had to go get the best deal, Intel Duo is the way to go. The cheapest is $180 at 1.8ghz and is roughly $30 more than 3800+ X2, but performs par with the 4200+ for the same price. The major difference is when you start bumping the speed. The Intel has WAY more head room and less picky about RAM. At stock speeds it run fine with 533mhz RAM, but not the AMD. It wants at least 667mhz or even 800mhz. THe only major downfall of the Intel are the boards. They are expensive, less feature rich as the AMDs for the money, and are a bit buggy at the moment. You can't get an $80 Intel board that beats an $80 AMD board with overclocking potentional and feature. Also, the AMDs will accept the new processors but not support the DDR3 soon to be standard.
Cliff notes:
-AMD 130nm or smaller are good cores, regardless if its 32 or 64-bit. But all are 64 now.
-Processors cheap for both Intel and AMD.
-Intel Core Duo is champ right now
