it all depends on things like pricing, availability, overclocking, etc. It doesn't sound like Conroe will be widely available until 2007. 2006 will mainly consist of yonah, merom, and presler production, with a few conroes thrown in. And you can bet that the conroes Intel does sell in 06 are a lot more likely to be niche, high end products rather than the low end overclocking monsters we want. Also, we have yet to see what kinds of clockspeeds Intel plans to release conroe at. We saw previews of a 2.8GHz conroe, and it destroyed; however, i also remember seeing previews of Banias and Yonah at similar speeds, but the actual products were sold in the 1.66-2.13GHz range, so take the benchmarks with a grain of salt.
I am pretty dissapointed with AM2, though. It shows virtually no performance gain with DDR2 (of course, AMD has been saying this all along, but according to everest, AMD's memory controller is just not very efficient relative to socket 939's), even at DDR1000 speeds. It makes me kinda glad I went ahead and settled on a dual core Opteron setup rather than waiting for AM2 to provide exactly the same stuff. Still, AMD has always provided a better bang for the buck, even when they were losing the technology race (Thoroughbred v. Northwood anyone?). AMD will simply have to price their products more attractively relative to Conroe offerings. The only area they won't be able to compete is at the absolute top of the line, since they will need to hit 3.2-3.4GHz speeds in order to provide competition to a 2.8GHz conroe (if one actually comes to market)
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