Maybe that should be 'scents', as in Labdog's posts <i>stink</i>. Heh heh.
Okay, bad pun. I know. Slap me silly.
Seriously though, back to Thoroughbred: I doubt AMD would put SSE2 or x86-64 into it because these <i>are</i> some of the major selling points of ClawHammer. (Or at least, I doubt that they would release a chip with these enabled.) If AMD released TBreds with either of these, then the desire to purchase a CHammer would be significantly reduced.
I might expect something like Barton's cache already built into Thoroughbred, but disabled though. (Much like P3-Celerons are.) This would allow AMD to switch to Barton with the core internals already tested by producing a few without the second half of the cache disabled, so then all they really would have to worry about is SOI for Barton.
I also expect something like AMD probably testing some better data pre-fecth/branch-prediction/etc. algorithms in TBred. After all, the Hammers supposedly kick the AXP's butt in this respect, so it is quite possible that AMD is squeezing some of the juice from the fruits of that research into TBred.
So I would really hope that AMD is putting something more than just a die shrink into TBred because they've certainly spent enough time and R&D lately to have at least <i>something</i> different. Whether or not we actually see that something different (because they may disable it before shipping, depending on what it is) is entirely another story.
As for AMD racing against Intel, well, the Athlons just won't cut it for much longer in the speed race. I think AMD is aware of this, which is why ClawHammer is coming out this year. (Instead of taking more time with it and releasing CHammer and SHammer/Opteron next year at the same time.) They aren't racing simply because their horse has already run itself ragged, and they're just unable to compete until they pick up a fresh remount. Once they switch to the new Hammer cores though, hopefully things will start to look up again.
<font color=red>Bob knew he was screwed when he saw the label actually read 'Tactile Nuclear Device'.</font color=red>