Right now, AMD's Phenom IIs are essentially competitive with Intel's 45nm Core 2 Quads. When Lynnfield comes out later this year with a Core i7-derived architecture, four cores, and eight threads, we can probably count on it outperforming the Phenom II overall—even if it's not quite as fast as the Core i7 clock for clock. AMD could foreseeably compensate by raising clock speeds, but I expect the firm is likelier to simply cut prices and offer slightly lower performance at a discount.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16419