Re: Benchmark sites and enthousiasts usually just compare the latest and greatest boutique parts, but those don't move the market share. It looks like AMD will have to spend a lot of extra capacity to move the mainstream from single core to dual core. Intel is rapidly moving towards 100% in that area (should be around 50% already). Whatever small advantages an Athlon might have left when Merom/Conroe arrive will be swiped away if the Intel product has an extra core to offer.
Good observation.
Note that Intel has also already crossed over wafer starts to their new 65nm process, so by the end of the quarter, >50% of all die shipped will be 65nm, and the vast majority of these will be dual core. That's roughly 20M processors per quarter and growing.
AMD's dual core volumes, on the other hand, are very small by comparison. 7% of, say, 12M processors in a quarter amounts to less than 1M. Add in the dual core Opteron supply, and you can estimate that AMD's dual core volumes last quarter roughly equalled 1M units. That's only 5% of what Intel will have this quarter, and AMD wants to command what... >20% of the market? Seems like they will be fighting the battle in the low end space pretty soon. It may not be difficult to sell 1M units right now with volumes so low, but as soon as they choose to compete with Intel's volumes, the prices will have to come down.
Just look at their prices right now. It's a rip-off for an AMD X2 processor. Their 2GHz, 512K L2 cache X2 has a list price of $303. For only $13 more, you can get a Pentium D 950 with much better performance at a reasonable 95W TDP. And AMD has nothing that can touch the price/performance of the 940 and 930 (at $241 and $209, respectively). These are the mainstream parts where all the volume is, and AMD has nothing more than slow single core processors to fill the gap. In the mainstream pricing segment, Intel has performance and price/performance already won.
The only difference is as you say, in the benchmark and enthusiast sites. You won't see them benchmarking the new Presler stepping, or show anything without the highest bin memory DIMMs, fastest disk drives, etc. That's because this is what their readers want to see. AMD has made a marketing success out of catering to this small segment, but it looks like Intel is catching on. I fully expect Core 2 Extreme to wipe the floor with Athlon FX. I think this will really turn the tide, because that always tends to have a lasting halo effect that increases demand in the lower segments.
It would be nice if Intel could take advantage of this prior to Core 2's July launch, but I'm really not expecting anything major until then.
