AMD allways were a 'small fries' manufacturer. The bottom line being that for a long time they only had the one fab. Even when they had the superior product and the demand to go with it they couldnt make enough chips. Then they got the new fab online and signed a big deal with dell. But have fallen a generation behind in terms of
cpu performance.
Because amd are small and lightweight (or at least they used to be) they were able to make great leaps in terms of performance to catch up with what intel were doing.
Intel due to its huge size just keeps on plodding along evolving its current products and shipping millions of its old products.
Intel have lots of fabs so they can manufacturer multiple generations at a time and even have entire fabs dedicated to making prototype chips.
Unfortunutly for amd penryn (yorkfield) has beaten phenom to market and its a corker of a chip that has alot of headroom left in it. From the reviews i've seen even though its a 3GHz chip (9x mult) its an extreme edition which means its mult is unlocked and all the reviwers have been able to hit 3.33GHz and in some cases 3.66GHz just by turning up the multiplier.
Which suggest intel could make a 3.66GHz (333x11) quad core
cpu that runs at 1.25v
even though its a 130w tdp chip measurements have been made showing that its a 74w chip fully loaded at 3GHz and only ~90w at 3.66GHz
Amazingly fully loaded a yorkfield uses 47w less than a kentsfield at 3GHz
(the kentsfield already used less power than a 6400+ dual core chip)
and the part that will have amd worried is that on a small
vcore increase all the chips can break the magical 4GHz speed on air. Reviewers have been getting chips past 4.5GHz on air / low end watercooling with just 1.45v however they're not wanting to break the new chips just yet and the voltage limit of 45nm chips is not yet known.
Personally i can hardly wait until the enthusiasts get hold of them and stick them under ln2, 5GHz should be easy, heck 6GHz might even be possible! (a chip was demo'd by intel at 5.9GHz not that long ago)