The past two years have seen radical changes to the way CPUs are marketed. It's easy to forget in our current world of $60 Celerons that it wasn't so long ago that Intel didn't market a single CPU to the budget conscious buyer at all.

Add to this AMD's new high-end Athlon CPU, which is the first time AMD has brought a CPU to market that handily equals, if not exceeds, Intel's best, and the need for a concise "Buyer's Guide" for current and future CPUs is clear.

In this inaugural first edition of Sharky Extreme's CPU Buyer's Guide we'll be analyzing the various CPU models available on the market and making recommendations based on our experiences with them. As new CPU models arrive in our test lab in the future, we'll be updating this guide to reflect on their level of performance and desirability as well.

We hope this article can serve as a constant reference for buyers navigating the rough seas of CPU purchasing, please feel free to post your comments or opinions on the Sharky Extreme Discussion Board to help us better serve you in future editions of the guide.

Constantly in a state of research and development, high-end CPUs provide the semiconductor manufacturers that make them with the highest degrees of profit margin and revenue out of their entire product line.

For the consumer, high-end CPUs represent performance nirvana, and the pursuit of the fastest PC experience that money can buy. Here's the breakdown on what CPUs constitute the current state of the art at the high-end of the market: