What do you guys think of it? This is supposed to be the successor of the very successful Core 2 processors and from what benchmarks there are out there, it looks to be yet another powerhouse. Hmmm….not very good news for AMD. As you guys know, I am a supporter of AMD since the K7 series and I had expected them to destroy Intel a few years back. But alas, money talks and Intel was able to win back the performance crown from AMD easily and seems that they are very aggressive against their only competitor. Of course, some people might think that this is good news for the market as strong competition will weed out the weakest but let’s think long term. If Intel beats AMD completely and we are left without any competition in the processor market, will Intel go back to it’s old tricks again? Remember the Penitum IV and the RDRAM joke that Intel played on us a few years back? You want that to happen again? You want to buy extremely costly processors and boards that has subpar performance? If AMD falls, that is exactly what will happen.

I really don’t expect Intel to come back so strongly and aggressively after their big massive failure a few years back. I had expected AMD to reign for a couple more years before Intel slowly gets back on it’s feet. This really surprised me. But now that it has happened, we can only speculate what will happen in the processor market. I would think that once AMD is out or nearly out of the market, we would see sudden increases in prices of processors and chipsets. And don’t be surprised to see that non-Intel chipsets to be released slower than before as Intel will attempt to find ways and means to restrict other chipset developments. Why would Intel want more competition in the chipset market when they themselves are doing so well there?

Anyway, let’s hope that AMD will come up with something to beat Intel in it’s own game. If not, dark times ahead for us consumers.