While Intel has been quick to regain a lot of the popularity lost during the past few years, that is no excuse to forget about the #2 company in computer processing. AMD made a name for itself with the original Athlon and Athlon 64 processors and it would only seem logical that its next generation product called Phenom (K10) was to raise expectations all over the place, and it did.

Today we will be comparing the Phenom 9500, 9600, 9700 and the 9900 (B2 Stepping) against the recently released Core 2 Duo E8400, as well as the very popular Core 2 Quad Q6600. An older Athlon64 X2 5200+ processor will be added to the mix as well.