Quote Originally Posted by Kuemmel View Post
You are missing some things here, it's not just about HT, etc. The problem is that AMD didn't optimize the execution units on Phenom / Phenom II as good as Intel did on Core 2 / i7.

The execution units of the Intel CPU's are much more flexibel and therefore depending on the application can excecute more instructions compared to AMD at the same time. In my on fractal assembler code I see that even Core 2 is about 30 to 40 percent faster at the same clock speed than a Phenom, when it comes to FPU or SSE2 performance.

If you wanna know more detail, take a weekend off ;-) and fight your way through the Agner Fog's nice guides:
http://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf
Interesting, I look forward to seeing some head to head comparos between Deneb and Ci7; it'll be a shame if 4Ghz Deneb = 3.6Ghz Ci7. If so, AMD is will be 18 months late to the market, again.