AMD's Phenom

I've been a serious fan of AMD, and owned their chips for quite some time, to the exclusion of Intel. My recollection of the chips I've owned from them includes a K6-200, a K6-475, an Athlon XP-M 2200+, an Athlon XP 2800+, an Athlon 64 3800+, and most recently an Athlon X2 5200+. The last Intel chip I owned was a Pentium 200MMX- seriously.

Anyway, despite all of AMD's "trash talkin'," their Phenom simply doesn't deliver on any promise at this point. As I see it, they're in serious trouble if they have a guy like me seeing their only option as a Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad, both Intel products. I've been seeing early benchmarks, but I always wait a while to see if it holds true, which it has.

I was particularly intrigued when I saw this data over on Tom's Hardware. I was also comparing a new Phenom to my nearly year old X2 5200+. I see no compelling reason to upgrade from an X2 to a Phenom as on many benchmarks it's simply not much better, even with an overclock. To really juice up the performance, an Intel Quad chip is needed, starting with a Q6600 or higher.

So where does AMD go from here? After a year of "wait till next year"just being completed, we're in for yet another year of this. If AMD doesn't get their act together, and real soon, this just might become a one horse race.

Jonas