The latest issue of The Microprocessor Report, considered to be a credible source of industry tendencies, features a comparison of AMD's 1.2 GHz processor with the P4 1.5 GHz.
According to the report, despite the lower clock speed the AMD processor will perform better than the P4 by about 12 percent, in current systems. The editor of the article stresses the "current systems" phrase, since he goes on to suggest that the reason behind the disappointing performance of the P4 is that programmers have not yet had the time to react to the P4's features by adapting their software.