I know its long, but bear with me here, I talk about everything.
K8L isn't coming out anytime near Christmas. Its slated for H1 2007, I'd give it around mid-2007. And K8L, just by being K8L, won't do anything for AMD. Yea, there are a bunch of changes coming with K8L, but there are no architectural changes that will improve the clock-efficiency. Thats what AMD needs, a new architecture. As AMD itself put it; "K8L is evolutionary, not revolutionary." Its just going to be a upgrade of K8, as the name implies. As for Quad-Cores, that'd be great for AMD -- If Intel wasn't bringing out their own Quad-Core processors about 9 months earlier than AMD. AMD's Quad Cores (Deerhound) are slated for Q4 2007, while Intel's Quad Cores (Kentsfield) are slated for Q1 2007. That can mean as late as December, and March 2007, respectively.
As for FSB, true, Intel just dumps the extra cores on the bus, and puts on a pained smile when you mention bus speed. However, the alternative is for AMD to have each die with one HT-out connected to the socket, but this again has latency problems, and potential routing issues. They both hammer memory latency, halve memory bandwidth, and generally make things slower for all cores. One would expect the one die slaved off the other to be the way AMD does things in the end.
On to the bencmarks then? The 2.4Ghz Conroe vs. 2.8Ghz FX-60 is misleading. When you see those benched, it shows the Conroe decimating the Athlon 64, not matching it. As of yet, there have been very few, if any, benchmarks showing the Conroe and Athlon 64 performing the same. All the benchmarks so far have shown the Conroe dominating. From all the benchmarks I've seen, I've made of a ratio that I think is pretty accurate. [Conroe:A64] = [1:1.33]. Doesn't seem so bad until you consider that CPUs don't run at 1.0Ghz. That puts a 2Ghz Conroe well over the FX-60, and a 2.13Ghz Conroe (since a 2.0Ghz doesn't exist) at the performance of the FX-62.
As for rev.G, it brings the things you mentioned, and also 65nm. But other than lowering prices a bit, and giving the Athlon 64s some higher clocking potential, it still won't help AMD's clock performance as it also doesn't bring any clock-efficiency changes. Its rev.G thats coming out around Christmas, not K8L. And thats hardly sometime soon. But some final food for thought - AMD has to clock a Athlon 64 at 3.5Ghz (according to the ratio) to compete with the Conroe E6700 (2.66Ghz). After that, (assuming they manage to do even that), they have to cut the price of such a high-end processor in half to compete with the $530 pricetag of the Conroe.
This next part is just personal squabbling. Core 2 comes out July 23rd, and G80 is supposed to be Q3 2006, fair enough. However, R600 doesn't come out until the end of the year. But we can still say that a FanATIc could wait that long. But...Vista and DX10 (almost the same thing) don't come out until Q1 2007. And K8L isn't coming out until mid-2007. Thats a long time to wait for someone that wants to build a PC right now, wouldn't you say. By the time K8L comes out, we'll be seeing GeForce 9 coming around, and then there's the potential for a FanATIc to wait for R700. Its a neverending cycle
Now you see why AMD is out of the game for quite a while? Intel's Quad Cores, while still maintaining their clock-efficiency dominance over AMD, and coming out 6-9 months before AMD's Quad Cores (which won't even be K8L, the K8L Quad Cores don't come until 2008) will wipe the floor with AMD's Quad Cores. And AMD has nothing up it's sleeve besides K8L, they're empty handed. As Anand put it, "When Intel first started talking about its new Core architecture, we turned to AMD for a response that it surely must have had in the works for years, but as you all know we came up empty handed."
Well...AMD IS rumoured to have ONE thing. Its supposed to be a super-clocked Athlon 64 FX processor. I'm talking 3.2Ghz speeds here, maybe 3.4Ghz. That just might be able to touch on the 2.66Ghz E6700. However, you have to consider the price of such a extreme processor, and the avaliability (good luck getting the few hundred that get made), and then compare it to the almost mainstream E6700. And ofcourse, there is the 2.93Ghz X6800 Extreme Edition Conroe.
Face it, our favorite company of 4 years has met it's match. AMD dominated the arena for 4 years, starting with the original Athlon, and kept the lead even though Intel revealed a new architecture (Netburst). Similarly, there is nothing to keep Intel from doing the same, and retain their lead while AMD bring out a new architecture (kind of, its not really all new). As sort of a final punch, Intel has new arichitectures (Nehalem - 45nm, and Gesher - 32nm) planned in 2008 and 2010, respectively.
I'm building a E6600 (2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4MB L2 cache) and G80 build when Vista comes out. I intend to overclock the Conroe to close to 3Ghz, and have the time of my life for the next few years.