There is absolutely no reason to be excited about AMD right now. They
made some bad business decisions over the course of the year, not
going with dual+dual solution of a quad core CPU was worst of them
all. Intel did that and they sold over million of them months ago. AMD
willingly gave them time to capture even more market share, while they
were sticking to their own solution which was financially
unreasonable.

Their current offerings are nothing but major disappointment. They
fall far behind Intel's Q6600, which was introduced in february (I
believe). If what you've been working on for months and it's the
pinnacle of your architecture, can't beat what the competition
introduced a long time ago, then you're in serious trouble. As
everyone in the industry knows, a whole new architecture isn't
something that can be changed in a month. It takes a long time to
develop it and it's the basis on which the company will build for a
very long time ahead.

For AMD to come out successfully, their new architecture should
compete with Intel's Penryn, not Conroe. And there is this nasty TLB
bug that prevents them to scale to higher frequencies and many people
think there is more behind that. Just look at the Barcelona line
(which apparently nobody really cares about). They should run at much
higher speeds by now. Something is really going wrong at AMD labs and
they don't have  the time nor the money to afford a thing like that.

And there is Intel of course, who is not to be underestimated at all.
They had just too much time to claim a comfortable position on the
market and can afford to set their own pace and prices. All their
pricing over the year was based on what they were comfortable with
since they really had nothing to compete with. Now if AMD comes out
with anything remotely dangerous, they can slash prices anytime. I
doubt AMD can afford to go much lower.

As someone in the thread claims about the loyal customer base, things
have really changed a lot. AMD established a loyal base among the
gaming crowd in the Athlon era. But this times are gone now. They were
waiting patiently for months and months, hoping  that their favorite
brand will come up with something decent. The wait is over. They have
all switched to Intel by now and the remaining lot will switch now
when Phenom was revealed. November is the time when most major game
titles are released and this holiday season parents will have to buy
Intel.

That said, I wouldn't buy AMD now at all.