After years breathing AMD's dust, Intel beat its rival to the punch by releasing its quad-core Xeon 5300 "Clovertown" processor for servers in November. But AMD's "Barcelona" quad-core chip, due to arrive midway through 2007, will be a significant notch faster than the Clovertown chips expected to be on the market at that time, said Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president for server and workstation products. "We expect across a wide variety of workloads for Barcelona to outperform Clovertown by 40 percent," Allen said. The quad-core chip also will outperform AMD's current dual-core Opterons on "floating point" mathematical calculations by a factor of 3.6 at the same clock rate, he said.

I believe by next summer Intel will have its native quad core out by then. Plus there is a lot to room to spare in the Core 2 duo and Core 2 quad base processor. In general by time that AMD comes out with there new CPUs, it hard to indicate performance against Intel current line. Core 2 line is not like the Netburst line which was last year at its end of life time, the new Intel architecture is at beginning of its life cycle. Who knows maybe even by end of year, Intel will have 8 core (Clovertown style ) out there. But both Intel and AMD pushing technology forward is a good thing, because this means better performance and lower prices for consumers.