I still think, that Intel will build secret big bang as with conroe
until that point it will look like in the Athlon 64 era, except the performance (which is important)
I actually think we have reached near parity in performance for the x86 instruction set between the two companies; single thread is still important (but not the most important) and Intel has it right now, but AMD brought cheap 8c / 16t to the masses, and the future is just going to be more cores (more efficient too), as all the consumer gets now is cut down server chips. And server chips are made for hosting VM's / cloud computing.
There are the thermal limits ultimately; do we want high clock or high core?
The future will be on who wants to take a different-ish approach to x86 design, which AMD did with Zen. Intel, so far, has been tweaking and adding on to Sandy Bridge for years.