What worries me though is that K10 will probably be around for quite a while and with Intel doing a new architecture every 2 years and the next one being in 2008 it maybe a long time with Intel having the upperhand after a short reign by Barcelona. That's assuming Barcelona is somewhat faster than the tweaked 45nm Intel Core products....
In server at the 4-8 (maybe a little for 16) socket market, cores related to Barcelona should perform better than current Core2 chips, and could possibly be competitive against the early 45nm derivatives. This will be workload dependent, it is likely that Kentsfied and Cloverton will still beat a Barcelona system at a number of workloads.
2-socket is more likely favoring Intel in some workloads at 65nm, probably totally in hand by 45nm, especially with some upcoming chipsets.
The situation doesn't seem likely to change for the better with Penryn.
With expectations that Barcelona will not make a huge impact in 2007, it is likely that Barcelona's critical period is going to overlap with an aggressive ramp of cooler, faster, and cheaper 45nm Intel chips.
The Barcelona line was the one that would have been good about 2 quarters ago against Conroe's ilk, not Penryn's a half a year from now.
For the desktop, Agena or Kuma is not likely to beat Penryn, and unlikely to beat Conroe. Barcelona's big changes deal with FP and SSE processing and quad-core optimizations, but the integer side is not radically different from K8.
Integer single-threaded performance is likely better than K8, but there is little indication and no definitive statements from AMD that it will be better than Conroe, and a number of hints and ass-covering vague statements to indicate that it will not be.
AMD's all about the platform and scalability, none of which will affect the desktop for quite some time.
