The article is missing the elephant in the room - the 6 core Phenoms are intended to compete against quad core i7s. Nehalem multithreading gives an incredible b

The article is missing the elephant in the room - the 6 core Phenoms are intended to compete against quad core i7s. Nehalem multithreading gives an incredible boost for multithreaded apps, usually 50%+ even for heavy tasks like rendering. On top of that, Intel is way ahead in the IPC game. I don't know what the lay of the land is currently, but back when it was a choice between 45nm Phenom X4 and 45nm Core i7 9x0 chips, in some circumstances a Core i7 thread performed the same as a Phenom core. Relevent Anandtech article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2978/amd-s-12-core-magny-cours-opteron-6174-vs-intel-s-6-core-xeon/6 http://www.anandtech.com/show/2978/amd-s-12-core-magny-cours... Which shows a 12 core, 2.2ghz Magny Cours chip being beaten by a 6 core 2.93ghz Xeon (the server equivilant of the 980X).