THEY'VE BEEN GOING BACK AND FORTH for months. These high-end processor comparisons we do have been a brutal back-and-forth battle between Intel and AMD for x86 performance supremacy. Intel took the lead briefly at 2GHz, then AMD introduced the Athlon XP and pulled back in front. The Pentium 4 "Northwood" hit the scene at 2.2GHz with a larger, 512K cache, and AMD countered on the same day with the Athlon XP 2000+.

The result? A tie.

It's been like this for months now, and I'm running out of ways to say, "Yeah, they're pretty much tied, except sometimes one is much faster than the other, depending on what you want to do." Last time out, we had more of the same at 2.4GHz versus 2100+.

Today, however, is different. While AMD struggles to deliver its first 0.13-micron version of the Athlon to the world, Intel is unleashing a new breed of Pentium 4 chips along with a new chipset to support them. These new processors will talk to the new chipset over a 533MHz front-side bus, which is, as we say in the industry, "really frickin' fast."

Also frickin' fast is the newest high-end Pentium 4, which clocks in at 2.53GHz. So has Intel finally found the magic formula for defeating AMD's finest? We're about to find out.