Back in the Pentium 4 days AMD pretty much dominated the entire performance spectrum, but every now and then there'd be benchmarks that Intel either won or came very close to AMD in. Although we're a couple months away from availability of Phenom, I do wonder what our performance charts will look like by the end of this year.

These days it's pretty much all Intel at the top, and given that I don't see AMD shipping a 3.0GHz Phenom this year I don't expect that to change. But what about at the 2.4GHz and 2.6GHz levels? Will we have a tossup of benchmarks that favor Intel vs. those that favor AMD? Not to mention that Intel has the resources to go out and work more software developers to ensure even more optimized performance for its architectures, not at the expense of performance on AMD but definitely benefitting Intel more.

I highlighted the importance of having two competitive CPU makers in the Phenom Preview. Intel uses AMD's roadmap to determine where it needs to be in the coming months/years, if AMD's executed roadmap is less competitive, then Intel doesn't push as hard (and vice versa, depending on who is in the lead). It's not an immediate thing, but if we don't get a competitive AMD soon we'll end up paying for it in the next 18 - 24 months. At least this time around Intel has a much better processor than during the P4 days.