this is what i have heard from someone else idk if they are right but ill let you guys say. i know this forum has a lot of people who like AMD including myself and i would like to see how much of this is true.
Intel has multiple teams designing processors. One stateside in the US and another in Israel. They both work on different designs.
The current Pentium 4 "Netburst" architecture was designed here while the new Pentium M was designed in Israel. Some time in the last 2 yrs it became abundantly clear to Intel that the Netburst architecture wasn't going to hit their goals. They were going to hit the wall much sooner. They promptly cancelled Tejas the next big Netburst upgrade and the successor to the Xeon.
In the meantime the Israel team delivered the Pentium M which traces its lineage not to Netburst but rather the Pentium III. The Pentium M is far more of an efficient processor in IPC and power efficiency. Intel decided that this was the way of the future because dual cores allow them to reduce their focus megahertz and just add more cores.
Thus Intel's roadmap is now completely centered around dual cores and the efficient Pentium M core(Banias). They have a Banias replacement for the Netburst desktop and workstation coming. I'm assuming these chips will likely have 2-4MB of shared L2 cache and a bevvy of other nifty things. I'd love to see a new SIMD unit as well.
AMD has Turion coming but it is no match for Yonah which will be out Q1 2006. I'm also thinking that due to the similarities of the Athlon/Opteron to the G5 it'll be hard for AMD to patch the power efficiency of the desktop and workstation Banias Dual Cores.
Thus not only do I think that Intel will match AMD in speed for the most part but they will do it using far less watts than the comparable AMD part. No more liquid cooling!!