Synthetic benchmarks
The AMD X2 range of CPUs always benchmark significantly higher in memory benchmarks than Intel's Core 2 Duo. The X2 6000+ falls in at around 8.5GB/s, just as expected.
The Athlon 64's memory access latency has also always been good, thanks to an on-die controller. Intel's latency-masking Core architecture helps it to gain parity here.
Pifast takes in memory bandwidth, latency and pure processor grunt to compute the constant to 10 million places. The X2 6000+ is the fastest of the AMD trio, obviously, but it even falls behind an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600.
Our cryptography benchmark, however, stresses other parts of the CPU architecture. As such, the X2 6000+ extends AMD's lead. Quad-core processing, a la QX6700, doesn't help here.
