"Problem is, Intel snagged all the low hanging fruit in terms of easy performance gains with the Nehalem architecture. You can only bring features like the memory controller on-die once, for instance. Moreover, we know that Sandy Bridge is not a radical new architecture in the mould of AMD's upcoming Bulldozer [link: ]. Instead, it's a major overhaul of Nehalem."
This stands out on nearly all sites that talk about SB. And although its a new arch, its not bringing anything new to the table really, not thats been shown to us. I think we will see modest increases from Nehalem. They will dial it down a little more, maybe add a few features to add performance and its likely that we will see SMT improved upon, but I don't think we will see any game changers from Intel this time around.
AMD on the other hand is releasing a very different arch, and it looks downright mean.
"Frankly, Intel's current Nehalem-class processors are more than powerful enough for most people's needs. More to the point, they're still much faster than anything Intel's main rival AMD can manage."
This is a point that stands out for me as well. And its true. The CPU's we have available today are more than enough, and unless we can get more speed per core, we won't see much in real world performance with the traditional x86 multi-core CPU design. I think this is what AMD is focusing on. Since software is playing catchup in moving to multi-threaded support, adding more and more cores now is almost a waste of time to the average user for real world performance.
So AMD will do something magical with BD imho. I've stated that here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/289159-28-bring-solution-bulldozer