wbmw - You can't claim that a 2.6/2.8GHz Athlon 64 mid-way through next year will be that much farther ahead of a 4.0/4.2GHz Pentium 4/2M/1066MT/s processor than they are today. Therefore, you can't say that Intel has no response for the foreseeable future.
Intel's response is easy: continue to ramp Prescott and derivatives until they can ramp 65nm by the end of 2005, or by Q1 2006 at the latest. They should have enough speed revs and cache sizes left before they get left hopelessly behind in performance.
Well, the game can change substantially with dual core chips, if AMD manages to deliver these ASAP. Prescott is unlikely to be packaged like that since it generates too much heat already in the 1 cpu form. So it might be that Intel CAN be left hopelessly behind in performance, if only for several months. But this is all speculation at this point ;-)
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