[citation][nom]jaragon13[/nom]Well, AMD really invented the Core i7 for Intel, Intel packaged it with their 10 billion dollars of development money.Truly, I want to see a laptop that features a Server CPU rather than a desktop or laptop - something with desktop speed abilities, but doesn't take as much power ( server CPU's are certified to run on less )[/citation]
Honestly, Jaragon, you are clueless. The Core i7 is a derivative of the Pentium III, and has nothing to do with the Athlon. They don't even execute the same instructions, their internal setup is completely different in terms of where their AGUs are, and how they process floating point instructions, etc...
Now, what people who really have no understanding of CPU architecture like to say is, Intel copied the memory controller being on die, and of course the Level 2 cache being part of each processor.
Integrated memory controllers are very old, in fact, they've had system on chips long before the Athlon 64 was even a twinkle in someone's eye. In fact, even in the x86 worlds, there was a chip in the 1990s made by NexGen that had an integrated memory controller. In fact, for desktops, it was a mistake to use it when AMD did, since the space was better served by a larger L2 cache in many instances.
AMD also made a mistake by creating a native quad-core processor before they were ready. Making the L2 cache so it was no longer shared made sense with the native quad-cores, and in fact this is the simpler solution. Intel sharing the cache on the Core 2 was more difficult, but also, better. With a native quad core, it no longer made sense, so they made it in a way that did.
These are hardly major architecture changes. The internals of the processors are clearly different, with Intel processors being vastly superior. AMD seems to have designed for worst case, Intel for most likely case, and there's a lot of legacy garbage in the Athlon processor that can go, like a powerful x87 processor, 3D Now!, etc... x87 isn't used anymore, SSE2 is, and x87 isn't even part of x86-64, so why does AMD still have a very powerful one? Getting rid of stuff like that will help them, at least to some extent. Better memory scheduling (aka memory disambiguation) will help a lot too.