Well, its Intel (all time No. 1) vs. AMD (hoping to find another "game changer").

AMD has opted to concentrate on future performance, they were looking for the right architecture for the next few years. Why? Because they dont have a chance beating Intel in their own game. Intel is the one that will let AMD bulldoze and steamroll the new instructions (because they can easily adopt it and then again strike AMD in their "changed game") while sitting back comfortably and watching the market change. So they always have the faster optionfor old software, cause that is what they concentrate on. And guess what? They are slowing down software improvements with that strategy. The software market will wait for Intel to adopt new instruction sets.

It will be like this forever, i cant see this changing...