AMD has the lead, both in performance and performance-per-watt benchmarks. However, Intel is in a good position to strike back with its progress in 65 nm manufacturing. Not only do the smaller structures allow for ramping up production volumes, but they also clearly help to decrease heat dissipation and power consumption. At the same time, more features such as the Virtualization Technology or larger L2 caches could be added (the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 is the first desktop product with a 4-MB L2 cache). Finally, the 65 nm generation allows for bumping up clock speeds: We guess 4 GHz for single cores and 3.6 GHz for the current double core products will be available by Q2/2006 at the latest.
