Don't be fooled by Intel's lack of competition these past couple years. They're not incapable of producing a good product, I think they were just caught off guard and were making bandaid fixes to an architecture not best suited to general purpose processing. The Netburst architecture is great for a few specialized tasks, but lacking in other areas. The Athlon 64 turned out to be a good all around performer so it raised a few eyebrows as Intel received some bad press over being beat by the underdog.
The Dothan is less like the Netburst design, which is a good thing. All this time Intel has had to figure out what will put the Dothan design ahead of the Athlon 64... what they need to do to make it into a dual core processor and remove bandwidth limitations and lower latency to leave room for clock speeds to scale. They don't want to be in another situation like the Pentium 4's with a 400-533 MHz bus and 400 MHz RAM that were incapable of supplying the CPU with enough data... the problem only getting worse as core clock speeds increase.
The main thing the Dothan has going for it right now is it's low power consumption while still maintaining good levels of performance comparatively.
I wonder what AMD is doing. We're now seeing all their plans that have been talked about for the past 3 years or so... first the A64... then 90nm low power CPU's... and now dual cores. I haven't heard about any new architectures they're working on... the only thing I've heard about is quad core CPU's. If that's the direction things go, rather than significant architectural changes, it then becomes a question of who has the better foundation... AMD, who's dual core architecture is now about 2 years old and coming into production now... or Intel, who's dual core architecture is being designed right now. It makes me think Intel will have an advantage in that respect since Intel can better predict what the needs will be 3 years from now than AMD could predict what the needs would be 5 years from when they started developing dual core processors.
