Quote Originally Posted by PetNorth View Post

Well, Phenom perfomance gain is just fine. K10 arch is OK, IMHO.

What's been the problem? two word: clock frequency.

AMD has failed with mhz, not arch per se (on the contrary, to me arch is fine and elegant), but clock frequency, for whatever reason, some L3 bug, or MB bug, or whatever.
Architecture is definitely a problem, seeing as how as the E6600 and Q6600, for the same hardware.fr benchmarks have nearly the same performance advantage (even when clockspeed is accounted for) over Phenom as the Phenom has over the Athlon X2. So, AMD needs to clock at least 10-15% higher than Intel to be competitive but given the current power consumption, doesn't have the thermal headroom to do so even if the core can scale that high.