Its really looking like AMD and Intel will be COMPETITORS again this season. K10 and Penryn will probably relatively equal in performance. AMD's Hyper Transport platform is, of course, better for a powerful processor and CSI won't be out until well into 2008. AMD may be able to stretch their legs for 6 months to a year, hopefully.

AMD will be able to stretch their legs for 0 months because penryn will destroy Barcelona and AMD will be reduced to a company like VIA.

Once that happens, competition will not hurt Intel any longer with stupid price wars, this way Intel can produce even better chips thanks to their higher revenues.

Wingless, I don't see how AMD and Intel are competing anymore. Intel will be releasing 45nm chips while AMD is just beginning to shift to 65nm. Intel has Quad cored chips (glued or no glue, they are still quad cored) at remakrably low prices that make AMD's 6400 look bad and pretty much make the FX-74 look like a waste of resources. What can you expect AMD to do? K10 may be promising, but it's hard to believe that a company so in debt on two frontiers can recover when delays plague the company and products cranked out are inferior performance wise, not necessarily quality wise.

Mr. Bonbon, are you an Intel employee? You see very passionate about defending Intel and prasing the company :) .

Moving from one scale to another smaller scale makes it harder to design a processor. Intel always has problems at first moving to a smaller fabrication process than AMD. The Penryn core will not be as good what people think. I predict that the Barcelona core from AMD will surprising exceed everybody's expectations. Sure AMD processors are little expensive, but an AMD system are a lot cheaper than an Intel system.

An AMD K8 core is three years old. When Intel Core 2 Duo came out, E6600 barely beat Athlon64 X2 5000+. Also E6800 power efficiency is not as good as AMD AthlonFX high end model at the time. Core 2 Duo can not handle 64-bit instructions as well as it should.

Where's the product that's gonna prove that AMD can kick some @$$???

The inquirer reports that Barcelona will do just that. Hard to say if it is true but I guess we'll see in two weeks.

http://theinquirer.net/?article=41970