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I just bought an X2 5200, and now it’s $50 less! How disappointing. Prices were cut sometimes almost in half today as AMD struggles to compete against Intel’s Core 2 Duo, arguably the better processor by a small margin.

I said this in my review of my new processor on Newegg — no one will ever notice a difference between the Athlon X2 and the Core 2 Duo in even the most strenuous computing tasks. Games will still play wonderfully (that mostly depends on the graphics card anyway), any OS will love the blazingly fast dual cores, and the biggest performance bottleneck will still be the quantity and speed of your memory!

Whether the processor is AMD or Intel makes only a slight unnoticeable difference, so I see a great advantage in supporting the underdog. Here’s why.

Competition from AMD very likely caused the C2D’s existence: the Athlon and Athlon XP’s lead in the market for several years and made Intel basically abandon the megahertz race (and NetBurst’s idiotic long pipelines in the process), then AMD was first to the punch with dual cores, which Intel had to counter and do better. The competition probably made all that development much faster and much stronger, and we have more powerful computers than ever because of it.

As a consumer, and not a microprocessor engineer, the best thing I can do to support this competition and the ensuing innovation is to help keep AMD alive and be proud of it. They’ve always given me quality stable systems, from my K6-2 (333MHz), to my K6-3 (550MHz), to my Athlon XP’s (first 1.4 GHz 1700+, then 2GHz 2600+), and now my Athlon 64 X2 5200. Even this very server is powered by four 2GHz Opteron 270 cores (thanks Slicehost!).

I see no reason to add a measly 10% of performance to any system if it only supports monopoly and stifles competition. Intel will always survive, trust me, but if you want to force them to make even better processors, support AMD. The lowered prices are in, and it should be a no-brainer when the top-of-the-line dual-core chip is only $249. Jump on it.

Simple directions from San Francisco to Paris on Google Maps. Makes sense, right?

Good to know they still have a sense of humor. See for yourself!

The recent upgrades to Google Maps are quite good! I like the subtle light building outlines now in the plain Map view, and the new Traffic overlay is real useful.

Interestingly enough, Japan’s maps look quite a bit better than ours, with location icons and other neat options we don’t see on our maps. Any idea if this kind of thing is coming to US maps anytime soon?