i know that amd's run at a lower clock speed compared to intel cpu. however most game requirments say only for pentium, for example hl2's recomended states u need p4 2.4ghz. now is that equivalent to amd ahtlon 2400+ or an amd running at 2.4ghz?
is p4 2ghz = AMD 2000+?
any insight would be helpful.

An Athlon XP 2400+ performs similarly to a 2.4GHz P4, yes.
So if a game requires a '2.4GHz processor', an AXP 2400+ should be sufficient.

Raw clockspeed, i.e. MHz/GHz is no longer the most significant factor in terms of performance - radically different architectures such as that of an AMD Athlon XP or Athlon 64 and an intel Pentium 4 cannot be compared by simply comparing raw clockspeed.

In order to facilitate comparability of different Processors according to their performance(NOT raw clockspeed), AMD introduced a 'Quantispeed' ">http://www.amd.com/us-en/asset...31B_Quantispeed_wp.pdf'-rating for their processors.

Since an Athlon XP or Athlon 64 can do more work per clock-cycle than a P4, it will perform about equal to or even better than a much higher clocked P4 - hence the xxxx+ rating.
This is because basically, intel's 'Netburst'-architecture(what the P4 is based on) sacrifices efficiency in order to be able to attain high clockspeeds.

In most cases, an Athlon XP xxxx+ should perform equal to or better than a P4 clocked at the corresponding figure in MHz(e.g. an AXP 2000+ performs about equal to or better than a P4 2.0GHz(=2000MHz)) - an Athlon 64 will usually outperform a P4 with a corresponding figure in MHz.
Actual performance depends on the application you're running...for example, an AXP will perform better than a comparable P4 model in most games, whereas the P4 will perform better in some media-encoding and rendering applications since a lot of them are optimized for its architecture.

Here's' ">http://www.amd.com/us-en/asset...nd_tech_docs/30579.pdf AMD's Processor Performance Evaluation Guide.
It's the latest version for the Athlon 64-line - it will give you an idea about how this rating works.

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The opinions expressed above do not represent those of Advanced Micro Devices or any of their affiliates.

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ok. thanks a lot for the info.