Originally Posted by bocastephen

The pricing issue is not an AMD vs Intel comparison, but an AMD 32 vs AMD 64 comparison. Back when I bought this laptop, HP was selling 32 bit AMD processors as well as 64 bit alongside their 32 bit Intel selection. This is two years ago, so well before the Intel Duo Core came out.

HP marketed the 64 bit option as faster and better because it was a "64 bit processor", implying that such technology would yield better performance because of that feature, while failing to advise customers that added performance of the 64 bit feature would be unavailable on a 32 bit operating system. That is the basis of my argument. At no time did their marketing material draw a distinction between 32 and 64 bit operating systems or disclose that no support or drivers were available for XP Pro 64. A regular, non-technical public customer would be led to believe that 64 was twice as good as 32, even though the inference derived from the marketing material was false. I believe this is one of the key basis for the lawsuit HP is facing in Europe over these chips.

So, a question for the experts - assuming I get my money back or an offer of a replacement machine, would I achieve the best performance from an Intel Core Duo 2 chip running 32 bit XP Pro when compared to an AMD 64 chip running 32 bit XP Pro? How would the Intel chip compare to an AMD 64 running XP Pro 64, assuming the computer is performing processor intensive photography layering tasks?