although based on rendering with pinnacle, the following link has a very interesting chart showing the relative rendering/encoding performance of almost all cpu's produced by intel and amd over the last 5 years.
Am I crazy or did I see a celeron faster than my p4 2.4? Yet my 2.4 was faster than a 2.66.
This only confirms my long held belief- computers and more specifically video editing seems like it should be logical, but it always happens that things don't work like they should. This is a world of work arounds and trial and error as far as I'm concerned.