AMD's PR rating system is trash. Rubbish. GARBAGE. NO useful comparison of AMD CPUs can be made based solely on their PR rating. It's nothing but a marketting number! Case in point: the 3500+ runs at the exact same clockspeed as the Newcastle 3200+ for socket 754. It has the same size l2 cache, too. Hell, the core is pretty much the same, except that the 3500+ has dual-channel memory support on the socket 939 platform. Previous tests have shown that dual-channel memory "ain't all that" for Athlon 64s. The performance advantage of the 3500+ over the 3200+ is marginal, at best.
If this article was intended to show the weakness of the AMD PR system, then it is redundant. Previous articles have done the same rather nicely. There was no reason to do so in such a heavy-handed fashion.
For a "fair" benchmark, you have to take an AMD cpu that fills the same market segment or would otherwise be expected to compete against a hypothetical 3.6F P4. Namely, you want:
Opteron 150
Athlon 64 FX-53
or
Athlon 64 3800+
Those will be competeting against Intel's top-of-the-line cpus in the very near future, simply because those are competing against Intel's top-of-the-line cpus right now. The 3500+ is the current "mid-range" and/or "value" cpu for the 939 socket. In my opinion, the 3500+ is currently horribly overpriced, considering how cheap the 3200+ and 3400+ are for socket 754. In many cases, the 3400+ is a faster cpu, to boot.
On NewEgg.com, a 3200+ Newcastle is $215 retail. The 3400+, which is clocked 200 mhz higher than the 3500+, is only $294 retail. The 3500+ is $352, even though it has the same specs as the $215 3200+(aside from the irrelevant dual-channel memory support).
So yes, AMD's PR ratings for socket 939 are screwed up, not that you had to go to the trouble of comparing it to a 3.6 ghz Xeon to point that out. In conclusion, I must say that it was NOT appropriate to compare these two CPUs.