The AMD is not king of the PC. Intel is. If basing on 1 or 2 apps fine. When based on overall power the Intel P4-3.2 Extreme Edition does a better job.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030923/index.html
Here are some benches on PHotoshop stuff.
http://www.barefeats.com/pentium4.html
Apple marketing may have something to do with this so I take these results with a grain of salt.
http://www.apple.com/powermac/performance/
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
Yes you are right about the OS issues. A CPU can only be as fast as the OS and its components. One thing to note I do not think or running the G5 as a Apple machine but use it as a Unix server.
And yes I an wrong about the G5. The fastest chip in a multi CPU configuaration to serve the most processes at any one time and the quickest is the Itanium 2
I did find the add the the AMD kicked the G5
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112749,pg,8,00.asp
But I personally would still use a IBM multiprocessor RISC box (Power PC chips) running Unix to handle 40,000-100,000 credit card transactions per day which is stored in oracle database than have a multiprocessor AMD running Win2003 server with Oracle handling those same transaction information.
