The comparison your making is nowhere nears as lopsided as it was back when the P4 and first AMD 64 were slugging it out. The performance gap is much closer now and if intel could put out a higher clocked cpu with the stock cooler (at a reasonable price) then they should but don't blame AMD for increasing performance and selling their chips at a decent price. Also these chips are not the same as the x2 chips physically so they are not just increasing on chip memory and mhz. The Phenom II chips are a completely different design with a newer memory controller, lower power requirements ,smaller die size and lower operating temperatures.. These chips can take a lot of voltage and still run fairly cool so who cares if AMD pumps up the core speed. To me if the cpu can take it why not. This seems to show just how well designed these chips are. AMD release a 3.6ghz version!!!!! Watch and see I bet they do.
No, the game isn't much closer now, it is about the same actually.
Why do you think I'm blaming AMD for anything, other than not being able to compete and not forcing Intel to lower their prices? Intel increases performance, and sells their chips at a decent price also. Why is that hard to understand for you? The chips from Intel that have competition are reasonably priced. Just because I'm not freaking about about how great the Phenoms are, doesn't mean I'm bashing AMD, don't try to make it sound that way. AMD raising performance is a good thing, I don't know where you got that I was saying it was bad.
I'm not comparing the Phenom's to the X2, I'm comparing the Phenom II's to the Phenoms. The entire Phenom series smells of netburst. Raising clock speeds to the breaking point, upping the cache to try and boost performance...its the same thing Intel did with netburst when they were behind.
And your comments about how well designed they are makes me laugh. If they were well designed, it wouldn't take 3.6GHz to compete with 2.6GHz. If they were well designed they wouldn't be at the 140w barrier already. And if they were well design they would be out overclocking Intel.
And the 965 can get about an 800MHz overclock on air, not exactly anything stellar when the i7's are getting 1GHz+ overclocks on air. How is that designed well?
Don't get me wrong, the Phenom IIs are a great thing for the industry. Anything that adds competition is great. And the Phenom IIs were definitely a step in the right direction for AMD, they just need to keep going in that direction. And the Phenom IIs are good processors, it is just that the i7s are better, more expensive but better...
