AMD's Phenom processors
 

The bottom line is that AMD's Phenom processors are currently too expensive and don't perform well enough to offer serious competition for Intel's quad-core processors. With the low clock speeds, AMD needs applications that make use of multiple cores to show off the benefits but, as most real consumer applications are single threaded (or maybe occasionally dual-core optimised), there aren't any real benefits to Phenom in its current state.

The situation has completely reversed from back in the day when it was Intel's Pentium 4 versus AMD's Athlon 64 -- AMD's Phenom processors are outperformed almost right across the board, and this is especially the case in gaming and single-threaded tests where the processors lack raw MegaHertz. That said, I almost hope consumers will buy them, just to make sure that there's still a market left for us enthusiasts in the future.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/200...700_and_9900/1