Yes, I pointed Mr. Sood's blog out to Sharikou his thread yesterday to ask for his opinion. I guess I should feel a bit guilty for having sicced Sharikuo on Sood.
In any case, I found it interesting that someone with first hand experience in dealing with Intel has found that their culture has improved drastically. (Although Sharikou interprets it as him being bribed and tricked by Intel). Sood also feels that Intel has a "killer platform" regardless of whether AMD implements Reverse HT or a 4x4 platform. He also correctly identifies the 4x4 platform as being extremely power inefficient and having minimal impact on the industry. (I'm not sure how people could feel otherwise when the platform is limited to FXs especially with the cancellation of the 1MB X2s and the 512k ones appearing to only physically have 1 HT link meaning that dreams of 2 35W 3800+ being used are unrealistic).
Of course, he is right that Conroe's impact depends on it's availability (which should be pretty good, Merom is the primary concern anyways), and that AMD is here to stay.
As for "killer platform", what is new besides a faster FSB? Conroe is all the same old shared FSB architecture that can't be scaled to beyond 4 cores.
The whole Conroe/Woodcrest thing is pre-announcing and paper launch. Servers have very low volume, yet intel couldn't provide any meaningful quantities of chips on the launch day. AMD has K8L working on 65nm too. It's just not ready for mass production at mature yield. AMD is not releasing them because it doesn't want to kill the sales of its current CPUs, and wants to provide a stable and proven product.
That seems to be something Intel doesn't understand. they had enough share that they could have just brought Core to the desktop to get rid of NetBust instead of this leap ahead that will DESTROY their profit margins. even if they do price them up they will still be dragged down by $50 P4s.
This will be a painful time for Intel, financially. And now they're talking about releasing more NetBust chips? What is Otellini smoking over there?