Re: you are assuming that the day AMD has the first working silicon, they will rush to show it. That is not necessarily a correct assumption.
It is not an unfair assumption, though. AMD is trying their best to be a PR machine, and they routinely show off products ahead of time to make it seem like they are ahead of Intel in every category under the sun (and they have some people fooled with this tactic). One would expect that Intel's noise on 65nm would have prompted AMD to show off some kind of progress, if they had anything to show. I conclude that they either have very little to show, such that it would be negative PR if the press were to compare their progress vs. Intel's, or they have nothing to show, in which case, they will be even further behind.
Now, keeping in mind the grey areas between process transitions, nothing will preclude AMD from having a 90nm flow with aggressive gate lengths and calling it a "65nm" shipment, and no one would know the difference. At that point, the argument is moot anyway, except that it leaves a lot of the expected performance and power enhancements of a true 65nm process on the table. The end result is that I don't expect AMD to have any more striking power or performance improvements for another 18 months, whether or not they stick to their supposed schedules with a PR product release.
If you want to hold me to this, let's just see when they are able to either A) scale past 2.8GHz in a dual core product (which I believe will require 65nm), or B) introduce a mobile dual core mobile product (i.e. 35W or less) that scales higher than 1.8GHz. My guess is that we'll see these products at the tail end of '06, or more probably, early 2007.
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