re: You also seem focused on the server market
Well my professional life is around servers - my opinions on desktop processors are little better than any other user.
But for what it's worth, here are my observations on desktop - mobile.
Starting with mobile, the core 2 duo products are easy winners. I have an engineering special laptop from Intel which gives a 3.0 Vista experience rating and runs 8 hours on a single battery charge. My daughter's laptop is a production core based Dell which runs about 4 hours on a charge. I purchased a pair of Acer Turion-based laptops as gifts for the extended family - while those give an acceptable experience, they run only about an hour on a charge. They were, however, about half the price of the Intel-based Dell.
On the desktop, Intel clearly has the performance crown with i7 - I have a 965 based system, and a Phenom II (940), both running 3.6GHz clock, and the i7 is faster by 30% on long jobs like rendering. However, the Phenom II is much cooler when loaded - I used a characterized heat sink to measure actual dissipation, and the i7 is putting out 170W at 100% loading, while the AMD chip is under 100W at load. I was also able to take the Phenom II to that overclock with no change in vCore - just jacked up the multiplier. And again, the AMD rig (CPU, MB and RAM) was about half the cost for the i7.
My day to day desktop is an E8600, overclocked to 4GHz. It is also under 100W at load, and does almost every desktop job as fast as the i7, since few apps take advantage of more than 2 cores. Price for that rig is about the same as the AMD setup.
Based on this obviously limited sample, AMD is at least in the game on desktop, especially if they come out with some higher speed grades. A 3.8 or 4GHz part would put them in very competitive shape.
In the mobile space, they have work to do, but if they can select low power chips they might do better on power. I was able to get the Phenom II 940 to run at .9 vCore, 2.6 GHz - at that point it was only putting out 30W at 100% load, with a pretty nice performance in Vista. If they could get a dual core part at 15W, they might have a better shot at the mobile market. AMD is also helped by the 780 chip, which gives a great integrated graphics experience in a low power package.
AI
