It is pretty clear why AMD focused on the server market. Without a complete redesign it is not possible to beat Intel's integer crunching power and the fast and big L2-cache and that is exactly what a modern game needs. Barcelona build further on the K8 architecture and inherited the relatively inflexible integer pipeline. While Core 2 has sophisticated reordering of loads and stores, Barcelona does a limited reordering of loads. While Core 2 offers a 32 entry queue to the integer units, Barcelona has 3 rather inflexible separated 8 entry queues. So the right way forward for AMD was to focus on HPC and server applications where it could leverage it's strong points. We can bash AMD for being so late, and coming up with relatively low clocked CPUs, but even a 2.8 GHz Phenom would not have raise AMD's ASP significantly in the desktop market. We can tell you that we are almost done with our first round of quad socket benchmarking and we can tell you that we are having a lot more fun than Anand: it is good old exciting fight between AMD and Intel. Don't believe us? Let intel do the talking again.

Johan knows his stuff. The ZDNet bloggers don't. It is that simple.