he Phenom quite obviously isn't a bad CPU design, given the way it performs on a per-clock basis and how its performance scales from one to four threads. In many cases, its enhanced execution cores crank out some solid gains in instructions per clock over AMD's Athlon 64 X2. Also, the addition of two more cores can bring substantial performance increases in applications able to take advantage of them, as many of our tests have shown. But at the end of the day, CPU performance comes down to a couple of variables, performance per clock and clock speed, and the Phenom doesn't have enough of either to allow it to catch up with Intel's fastest 65nm Core 2 processors, let alone the even-more-potent 45nm ones. I sound like a broken record, but AMD is going to have to achieve something close to clock speed parity with Intel in order to compete for the overall performance lead. That's how closely these two architectures appear to be matched at this point.

Bah-humbug.

Intel's 2009 chips will be 8 core, hyperthreaded (16 threads), with a integrated gpu unit, and onboard memory controller.....