For a retail price of $230, the 9950 is an interesting choice from AMD. This has driven the price of the 9850 Black Edition down to the $200 level in 1000 unit quantities. The 9950 performs higher than the 9850 across the board as to be expected from a CPU that doesn’t have any architectural differences than the higher clock speed over the older CPU.
Intel’s closest CPU in pricing and capabilities seems to be the Q6700 CPU which is priced at $240 online at Pricewatch and the 9950 is priced at $234 at the same website. The Intel CPU has 8MB of L2 cache, while the AMD CPU has 2MB of shared L3 cache. Unfortunately, I don’t have the Q6700 to compare this CPU with but apparently the 9950 competes well with it and the Q6600 that is very popular due to the price point and overclocking ability. AMD will have to do more to compete with Intel in the future including moving to 45nanometers process and having DDR3 support which will likely occur later this year.
