And why would it be a bad thing if Intel came out with something that trumped amds processors? wouldn't that spur processor research.... drop prices for consumers... give the consumer more choices...... heck you act like you know something we don't by that statement... care to fill me in on your insider info... you must have some w/ that statement...
I don't claim any insider information.
The only way it would be bad for Intel to take the lead again so soon is competition wise. AMD needs time to gain corporate respect enough to hold onto market share even if they are "only" a close second. Look at some of the comments here still claiming that AMD runs hot and Intel runs cool in spite of the length of time it has been the reverse. Those comments show how AMD still needs time to reverse the years of "Intel Inside" being all that mattered.
The market place needs Intel not to achieve dominance again soon to maintain competition rather than Intel controlling things as they have since IBM chose the 8088 for the original PC until the Athlon came out and showed that AMD
could compete. Even when AMD showed that they could compete it was not until the last year that the corporate market began to adopt them for servers and workstations because of that Intel Inside attitude.
To put it bluntly assumptions are being made based on propaganda from Intel. The propaganda may in fact be absolutely true and fair based on what Intel knows/believes or it may not be. Even if Intel is being fair and honest they can't be sure what AMD will be doing that may change things. They can't be sure what faults may occur to hinder production. Remember that Intel announced a 4 ghz Pentium IV that was never shipped and announced that the Pentium IV architecture would carry them to 10 ghz. Intel is capable of error. Therefore I think that proclaiming that Intel is on the verge of dominating and controlling the marketplace is premature and if it occurs will be bad for us as consumers.
People are using a comparison sponsored by Intel and controlled by Intel of a future chip design not yet ready for the market and without its specs finalized against a current chip from AMD to claim that Intel is about to take back market leadership. I'm sceptical of that because no one outside of Intel can really say if that chip was being fairly compared or if the test was skewed to favour Intel. What speeds will the chip actually be released at? Will all the features that were on the demo chip be present in the final chip (cache size for example)? Then of course the fact is no one yet knows how well AMDs chips will be performing
then as they will be releasing chips using DDR2 (800mhz according to the reports I have seen) which will affect the AMD chips performance. Again no one knows what clock speeds and cache sizes AMD will have which just like the memory will affect performance. The comparison is speculative and of questionable balance yet because it is Intel some people take it as gospel.
What would I like to see? For now I would like to see AMD maintain leadership so they can gain the corporate mindshare that they need to take and hold enough market share to ensure long term competition. AMD needs that to get the cash to build the production ability to take and hold market share. I'd like to see VIA pull a totally unexpected rabbit out of their hat and enter the competition at the top as well. I'd much rather see a 3 way race than 2, but if I can't I definitely want it to be 2 way rather than 1.