while shopping for various products, in the specs they often say, for example, "System Requirements: Pentium IV processor 1.2 GHz or faster". how, or where, does one find out what other brand processors equate to those specs?

IIRC, even the slowest AMD Athlon or Sempron would be able to handle that easily

it can be confusing though cant it to someone who dosent know a lot about how chips work and their manufacturer's nomenclature. the AMD 3000+ chip runs at 2000mhz. the AMD duron 1200 runs at 1200mhz. it does sound strange. what the amd 3000+ does is that though it runs at a clock speed of 2000mhz it can perform at the same rate as a pentium at 3000mhz. what processor would you be referring to? yours? post back and we can give you more insight as to its specifications, i can find you a website that descibes muchos better than what i did, about how they work.

thanks for the replies!

i have an AMD Duron 1600MHz and am wondering how that equates to intel cpu's, specifically the Pentium IV processor 1.2 GHz i mentioned

also, it would be nice to have a web site reference for the future

the Duron is more inline with the Intel Celerons than the Pentium IV
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/Produc...%5E1042,00.html

Although the speed of your chip is 'equivalent' to a 1.6Ghz chip, the lack of whats called L2 cache means that it doesnt have the oomph that the Pentium 4/Athlon has.

I would say that a celeron 2Ghz has roughly the same performance as a 1.2Ghz Pentium 4
The Durons have always been weak in my opinion and topped out at 1.8 GHz and they were supposed to be equivalent to the celerons.

Ignore the minimum specs for most things. As long as your RAM is more than the minimum, you can supplement a weaker processor using more RAM.

The Processor Scorecard:
http://www.cpuscorecard.com/index.htm