I'm always glad to read about Intel mistakes, screw ups, fumbles and missed expectations, now if AMD can take advantage of this and deliver its product on time it has a chance of gaining back some ground.

mines the one with the green AMD logo on the shoulder and "powered by Opteron" on the back!

I just don't get your reasoning. Wouldn't be best for both companies to do well ?

Nehalem scales to 8 cores, that is very difficult for AMD to swallow. Nehalem is a very significant development, as it catches up with the theoretical technological lead that AMD had, and as such no more has. Unless AMD can deliver like hell and execute flawlessly Intel will be the clear winner here.

Now Intel will have both the mass market momentum and technological lead. AMD had considerable trouble bringing a quad core to the market... No I am not happy about this, because two good chip companies would definately be better than one. Without AMD we most probably still wouldn't have 64bit computing on our desktops but vague hype about the Itanic.

Interesting to see that Intel's previously top VMmark benchmark score has mysteriously been withdrawn because the "result used a configuration that was not fully disclosed and….thus violates VMmark publication requirements." http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results/withdrawn.html

Looks like AMD is back on top with Barcelona.