No need to bring income into this-I guarantee you I'm poorer than you are. For the record, I've never actually owned a Core Duo (although I now own a Core 2 Quad). But my system previous to this one was a 900MHZ AMD Athlon "Thunderbird", with a paltry 256MB (2x128MB) 133MHZ SDRAM and a 32MB TNT2 M64 video card. For a while I was running only on 128MB-then I found the other stick. But I basically put that thing together out of parts that no one wanted anymore-and for the longest time I ran a 4.76GB hard drive in it because that was all I had.
And in any case, I've done my research, and I've kept up.
The main thing wrong with the P4 is Intel should have stopped producing it when they hit 3GHZ. (The Northwood was actually fairly good.) Instead they tried to hit 4.0GHZ+ and in the process managed to make it consume far more power than should be necessary. Then they stuck with that design and tried to fix it when it wasn't fixable. For the record, their initial design plans for the P4 had it going to 10GHZ, which should have been obvious that it would have never been achievable. There's also the issue of efficiency, as the P4 simply wasn't capable of doing as much at the "same" time as the Athlon 64 at the time, but when compared to the previous generation, both of them were at least an increase.
Apart from the very first P4's, at least, which couldn't even clock as high as the final P3's!
