http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11...ghai_partners/

the most interesting bit of that article being:

Back in September, AMD said that with higher clock speeds and tweaks in the instruction stream, Shanghai chips would deliver somewhere between 15 and 30 per cent more performance compared to equivalent Barcelona chips. And then it hedged and said customers should expect around a 20 per cent boost for an average workload. On a conference call with tier-two system vendors today, Burke Banda, product marketing manager for AMD's Server and Workstation Division, said that early tests by system vendors showed Shanghai delivering about 35 per cent more performance and that the newer chips consumed about 30 per cent less power.
Now, while i haven't had hands on time with the Shanghi/Denub, being a blood relative of one of the top AMD bigwigs that has gotten to play with the chips is good enough for me. Yeah, those numbers are acurate, probably lowballed a bit just to be safe. So I7 and $600-$1000 or so it would cost to get a low end chip that won't give much performance gain as well as power consumption i think i recently saw over current quads...well the only thing funnier will be 6 months later when intel puts another socket out....that needs new ram, cpu and possibly heatsink.

Yes AMD is putting out 3.5ghz chips with low TDP and headroom to OC.
Yes the the aircooled 4.3ghz OC was real. Yes it was done with a midsized heatsink only topping out at 55c at 100% extended continous load. I believe 4.6 or 4.7 was hit by setting the voltage to nuclear but with that heat sink was in the mid 60's somewhere and unstable...but not 100% on the specifics there but are in that area....

no, it isn't just a die shrink, you don't get an gain 1000-2000mhz clock speed while dropping power consumption from a die shrink.

C2Q benched better in 32bit apps, where they were right in line with the 9600 or 9700 phenoms, which are 64bit chips. Some may have noticed that when you bench the 64bit chips in 64bit apps....their performance jumps in the realm of 10-20%.over 32bit numbers

I really don't care if AMD can take the performance crown back, its a small fraction of the market. They are getting some server clout back, and we will be able to go back to buying cheap AMD chips, and doubling the clock speed to beat out FX chips =P.

But let the baseless arguments commence =D