The current Core 2 Duo beats K8 by around 15% in gaming at the same clock speed. In other things like DivX encoding, photoshop, office applications intel beats K8 by about 25% and 30%
Penryn is going to be around 10% faster than the current Core 2 Duo in gaming. In other things it will be around 0 to 10% faster.
In programs that use SSE4 instruction like DivX6.6, Penryn is 100% faster than the current Core 2
So, in the other words if you compare Penryn with Barcelona, then Penryn would beat it in almost everything.
Phenom is going to have HTT 3.0, but how much difference HTT 3.0 will make ? 3% or 5% ?
HTT 3.0 is not going to save AMD
Not to mention that K10 performs very bad in non gaming application like encoding, office application etc. Just look at Barcelona performance in DivX 6.6 encoding compared to K8 (only 11%). Pernyn is going to be twice as fast as the current Core 2 in DivX 6.6, if Barcelona can't beat the Core 2 in DivX6.6 encoding then how it will able to compete with Pernyn
The only place where AMD might beat Intel in is the synthetic benchmarks like 3dmark and PCmark. But who cares ? 3dmark and PCmark are noting. They are programs that only score points and they don't tell you which processor is better
...............
Few moths ago many rumors, and many AMD fanboys ( like Apokalipse) claimed that AMD Barcelona is going to be around 40% faster than Intel processors.
But AMD Barcelona just came out, and they are not as good as what AMD fanboys claimed. Not even close
If you read older threads here you will see many AMD fanboys making posts like "AMD is going to beat Intel", "K10 is 40% faster than Intel", "AMD is better because there processors are "true" quad core" blahbalbalabala etc............... If you read those rumors and lies, you would thing that k10 is going to be the ultimate processor that noting will be able to touch it !!
Next time I hope that AMD fanboys wait for the actual results before they open their mouths
I don't want to make any war here, but people should wait for actual results instead of hype and rumors.
EDIT: And in Anandtech conclusion, it says that the new architecture from AMD is not powerful enough to compete with Intel Penryn
And it also says that the Phenom chip is large chip, and Penryn is a small chip. In other words, intel have the ability to reduce the price of Penryn without losing a lot of money.
Read this
AnandTech: AMD Phenom Preview: Barcelona Desktop Benchmarks