Wow crazy.

Who knows whats happening. This is all a game, can be played by Intel and AMD. R600... not too much different in the buildup. Pure lunatic fights and lies passed on as fact everywhere, minute day and night. Most guys I saw speak affirmatively lost their credibility as quack "prophets" because of it, and hopefully learned how to refrain from gross exaggerations which can destroy a company if the product doesn't match the hyped expectations.

Was it any decent? Not when it was released which most so die hard expected, drivers were poor, early DX10 was poor, massive delays, hyped up grandiosely but hype was just that, pure vacuous hype. But you can find versions of it in retail now (i.e. extreme-pc) which beat the G80GTS and GTX - get a good enough MB for it first, which I think comes in the form of RD790 with the appropriate PCIe 2.0 16x bandwidth (remember, it was originally made for PCie 2.0), CF scales excellently and it does hold the benchers 2k6/2k5 records, so it 'aint a failure at all. Still, people tend to regard it as failure due to not leaving a shock attack on them when first released.

One things damn obvious: K8 was awesome for its time and Core 2 was and still is, in its time.

Barcelona-Penryn? That's a new phase with different competition.

Barcelona was not originally made or planned to compete against Penryn or Nehalem at all, but Core 2. The 6 month delays meant it now faces a more renewed and optimized opponent. This is a fact anyone at AMD will tell you. That in itself is a major loss and stress for them.

-Barcelona server or desktop: different ball game.

How good? We have The Inq and Rahul Sood saying one thing, and Coolaler forums saying another. I have more reason to believe none, both parties are out on jury until further evidence, but Rahul speaking about this in his position seems a little strange. They do have the retail and sample CPUs and they would've tested them quite well by now, so he has a better position to speak than both the previous sources or anyone I know online. This makes the perfect setting for confusion in the face of Coolaler results, and thus, I step back to see who pans out closest to the truth.

Phenom has higher clocks attainable than Barcelona Opteron. I think highest AMD might hit late this year is 2.4-5GHz. I doubt higher, as an estimation, but they have headroom is what everyone so far is stating and might ramp it up sooner. I don't expect a quad core Agena/Agena FX will get beat by a QX6700 clock for clock. I find that hard to believe after R600 they would carry on if that be the case. I doubt business works like this at all, at the least, it will outperform a current Kentsfield but not attain high clock speeds.

-Penryn wouldn't be released if Intel believed Barcelona was worse than a current Xeon/Kentsfield, simply put, and current prices would be that of Tigerton, much higher.

Penryn any good clock-clock? Apart from what SSE4 and smaller fab brings, highly doubt it. In multimedia I believe Intel has hit home. Do they have supply numbers to release late November like they've been leaking? If they did, they wouldn't be releasing Tigerton now but Penryn instead. I doubt they have the supply to release it yet, and are having trouble with meeting even those speeds within the given TDP packages. I reckon its a race; they want to release it in mid-late October, but numbers, bugs and clock speeds is the concern.

Any firm can make one such chip and show it around, AMD or Intel. Intel Core 2 was touting 4GHz quad cores in July 2006, but we won't even have those with Penryn 18 months after AFAWK.

What ends up in retail, the supply numbers/clock-per-clock over previous generation and competition/performance/watt/cost efficiency is what matters most.

So far, I'm undecided and refuse to play the guessing game and give sides which'll guesstimatingly be better. I just know the architectural details and whats around online.