It could be said that both companies have excellent engineers, and it surprises me everytime AMD releases a new chip. Considering the size and fiscal difference you have to give AMD credit for not only holding on, but for also trying to consistantly raise the bar. However, it should be noted that with the inlcusion of IBM into AMDs future design and production, they will be getting much more competitive. How many other industries have a little guy that constantly tries to beat on the monopoly, and gets away with it. We all know that with one phone call Intel could put AMD out of business, but I am sure the government would definitely come down hard on Intel for that.

What people fail to realize is that companies of this size (both Intel and AMD) are not stupid. AMD knows what Intel is making and vice versa, for the most part, they have intelligence years out. AMD knows about where performance wise Prescott will be in a year, and similarly Intel knows where the A64 will be in a year. This allows them to engineer and produce based on future predictions. So sure, Prescott may kick *** when it comes out, but I would expect AMD to have already accounted for that and to have a match for it. When AMD began working on the Opteron/A64 they knew how much time they had before the Athlon was going to be overtaken by the P4. Unfortunately delays prevented the release at the right time, and the result has been that for the last eight months or so AMD has not been as competitive as they would have liked.

In the end what we will find is that after this generation, if AMD makes it they will be a very different company. For the first time ever AMD is offering something that Intel is not. This moves them away from the Intel clone stigma and allows them to create a stronger brand name. Whatever the case, this split in architectures will be good for the industry. It is one thing to have competition based on the same core architecture, but it is much better to have competing architectures, there are more options there. This does lead to a problem though. Testing and benchmarking both sides fairly will become a bit more difficult as we move out of the clone generation.