There was never any argument here to begin with. This is not like Lambo vs prosche, not like nvidia vs ati nothing like that. there's no two versions of the truth, only one. This is not artwork, there are numbers involved and they are not open to debate.
1.FACT - Phenom (K10/K10.5) architecture is inferior to Core in IPC (instructions per clock)
2.FACT - Nehalem is superior in IPC to both Core 2 and K10/10.5
Value, bang for buck all that, you can debate however using a simple matrix such as frame per dollar and there AMD wins. Again this is just numbers, divide frame rate by system price thats all.
3. As you pay more for CPUs, the performance gains diminish, so Core i7 920 is not half the performance of a Core i7 975 in anything, yet it costs less than half the price. This is not a new discovery, its always been like this, so arguing that one cannot utilize all the power offered by a certain CPU yet they pay x amount is rubbish. for that little bit more power, you pay that much more thats how technology works.
4. Its not true that 2% of software is not multi threaded, or anything like that. Most games that are multi platform are multi threaded because the consoles are multi threaded machines. These days thats virtually every game coming out, media encoding, file compression, etc... Ultimately more cores and total CPU IPC will matter more than single thread IPC.
Next year AMD's thuban 6 core will face off against Intel core i7 10XX series 6-core 12 thread CPU. This is until Magny cores form AMD shows up with 12 cores (2 thuban CPus in one package) to face off against 8-core 16-thread core i9.
