louis.du...@gmail.com

"The math-focused analysts don't understand the technology enough and
how a chip with less "megahertz" or more "nanometers" can outperform
another processor with better specs on paper."

This is a really a very poor analysis of the situation. The analysts
have this one right. AMD caught Intel sleeping at the wheel 4 years
ago when Athlon and Opteron were taking sales away from Pentium 4 and
high-power/low MIPS Xeon processors. Intel is too smart a company to
let that happen again.

To counter the argument that less "megahertz" and more "nanometers"
don't necessarily translate to better performance I would point you to
recent reviews that are easy to find (tomeshardware.com or
anandtech.com or hexus.net) that show that even at the same clock
speed Penryn based Intel CPUs outperform AMDs latest and greatest
Barcelona desktop CPUs. Compounding this problem is that AMD must
recall some Phenom chips because of a TLB problem with a workaround
that drops performance by 10-20%. Then add in the fact that Intel CPUs
can be clocked MUCH higher than current Barcelona chips. All these
facts add up to a very poor performance by AMD.

AMD needed to execute flawlessly to stay in the game with Intel. So
far they have fumbled and thrown and interception and Intel is much
more paranoid about the competition because of the surprise AMD gave
them 4 years ago.

AMD's only hope at this point is for a huge lawsuit settlement in the
EU under their anti-trust claims against Intel but that will take
years to settle. I can only predict more pain for AMD in the near to
mid term.