why would intel have something quicker out before amd's next fast part? i mean just saying it because its intel makes no sense because. when amd got something faster out than intels P4 its not like they just magically made something faster instantly.
also you are very wrong, intel CAN'T add cores just at will, the kentsfield is 2 conroes spliced together, not a 4 core cpu. it will have a very very limited bus as it won't be changing, yet. the CSI bus is not due till kentsfields follow up core and that probably means not till at least q3 2007.
amd are supposed to have quad core K8L's out in probo q1, poss q1 2007. half a year does not bankrupt nor change the general outlook of a company. 99% of computers buyers are not at all aware that a conroe pc is faster than a athlon 64 pc right now. 99% of users really never load the cpu properly , word processing, surfing and gaming is basically not cpu limited. 99% of people would based on using a pc be unable to tell you which computer had a celeron 2.6GHz and a 4Ghz conroe in. seeing as we mean less than 1%, probably less than 0.1% of the profits amd and intel see our outlook and knowledge means nothing.
K8L is a native quad core part with a much much better bus system with far higher bandwidth. early benchies have shown the kentsfield do 21seconds super pi 1mb on one core, and each core run at 25seconds when all 4 run an instance at once. thats a 25% drop in performance due to the limited bus and this is on a super pi 1mb which should fit in the cache(which is 8mb). how would a encoded or a superpi 32mb run when each core is loaded. K8L will increase efficiency of the K8 quite a lot so will be faster clock for clock, added to a far lower contended bandwidth subsystem and the K8L might be a really really fantastic cpu. also amd should hopefully be able to bump speeds up and wattage down with the 0.65nm jump they are yet to do.
they already compete with conroe on wattage people just don't know it. intel give average use figures, considering 99% of people don't use their cpu's much at all no one can really tell what intel have decided was "average" use. amd state numbers that are theoretical numbers which again, in theory, can not ever be seen in real world use. IE its the number amd's use when the cache, fsb parts of the core, and every single register, every fp unit every single transistor on the core is in use. however cpu's crave info, they won't always have sse , sse2 and other extra bits of info to cram into the cpu. so while intels numbers are average amd's are maximum.
also remember that the northbridge on intels use power for mem controller that is included on the cpu die for amd which includes the power numbers while intel don't. you can see that the difference between closely performing p4/ath 64/conroe systems the p4 and conroe systems both have extremely high temp northbridges, due to putting out more heat.
