AMD's new architecture should be coming in the second part of 2011. This is AMD’s only hope to catch up with Intel as Nehalem is about to get replaced in late 2010 with new architecture codenamed Sandy Bridge.

We decided to create a little performance index by taking all the benchmarks into account. Since computing-intensive applications require the most horsepower, we weighted them at 50%, games at 25%, PCMark Vantage at 12.5%, and 3DMark Vantage at 12.5%. The result is a 5.8% performance benefit for the Phenom II X4 versus the Athlon II X4 or a 5.5% performance decrease if you use the Phenom II X4 as the basis. You probably have different priorities, so it’s important to point at minimum and maximum differences. Some benchmarks benefit by 20%; others don’t benefit at all. Yet, the 5% to 6% aggregate performance difference is the number you should remember.

It is evident that consumers and IT buyers are suffering in the desktop and workstation markets due to weak competition from Intel's only real competitor. Either AMD needs to come up with a new winning design, something not immediately evident from its current roadmaps, VIA needs to buck up and take a shot at the mainstream, or even more unlikely a new entrant such as Nvidia would need to come up with a serious first entry into the market to shake things up.

Ok, seriously, VIA? I like VIA, but they are not fielding a mainstream CPU.

We've seen this incumbent dominant position held by Intel before. Before AMD mounted a strong challenge with its Athlon offerings, Intel had a less than stellar processor offering with its Pentium 4 Netburst architecture, which was deservingly lambasted as power-hungry and stubbornly unscalable.

Uhh, the Athlon was out way before Intel's Netburst architecture. It went head to head with the Pentium III.

Llano is based on a revised Phenom K10.5 core, naturally shrunk down to 32nm and since Llano has both dual and quad-core versions, and the company plans at least two chips. The graphics inside is based on Evergreen DirectX 11 graphics core. (Fermi and Evergreen are probably the least cool codenames in the history of computer graphics. Ed.)

The Baby Quads are probably just what AMD needs. In the current economy, everybody is increasingly cost-conscious and the US$ 99.- offering of the Athlon II X4 fits that bill perfectly. Never has a quad core CPU be more affordable than now, moreover, there are inexpensive motherboards out there that support the Baby Quads (along with any other high-end offering from AMD).