that is 18 months from here, and roughly 3 years after AMD sped past them with A64. that is a looong time in this industry.
Will they finally catch up with AMD then ? My guess is as good as anyones, but I still kind of doubt it. ~2.5 GHz, with a "large IPC improvement" over Dothan. That certainly doesn't sound bad, but they will really need it too. Consider AMDs current 90nm products seem to have tons of headroom, real world max power consumption is not exceeding 30W per core @2.4 GHz today, with first products. That, as well as early overclocking reports makes >3 GHz 90nm parts most definately possible, and that alone would already require a "large IPC improvement" from intel to keep up with @2.5 GHz. But by that time, AMD will also have moved to IBMs 65nm, possibly with other improvements like DDR2-800, and hopefully, faster (possibly larger) caches, and reworked SSEx units.
Its good to see intel finally has something up its sleeves, and something to look forward too, but I'm not sure AMD is really worried. Seems like even good old K8 should be able to cope with it.. and not much later we should start seeing K10 or whatever its called, and all bets are off again.
= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =