thank you Quantum,
can you talk me about the CPU revolution from P4 to now ?! i think i wasn't in this world for 3 years! 
Well essentially P4 was crap, it consumed too much power, generated too much heat and increasing its clock speed didn't provide huge leaps in performance, so Intel scrapped the line all together. While P4 was out, AMD came out with the Athlon 64 and the Opteron line which just battered P4 and Xeon in the desktop and server markets, consuming less power, generating less heat and out performing them considerably. The Athlon 64 was a 64 bit CPU, it was backwards compatible with all 32 bit stuff and if you couple it with a 64 bit OS you can go over 4GB of RAM Which you can't with 32 bit stuff. Intel released a 64 bit CPU called Itanium, which essentially bombed, it wasn't backwards compatible and emulation of old code was VERY slow. Intel also tried releasing dual cores based on its netburst architecture (i.e Pentium 4), but they scaled poorly and were again left behind by the Athlons.
Fortunately for Intel they were working on a 2nd line of CPUs, the Pentium M line. Based on developing a fast CPU at low power and heat, it developed a lot better ideas than the Pentium 4, in fact its starting point wasn't Pentium 4, it was Pentium 3, it has developed in a completely different direction. The Pentium M architecture was developed and turned in to the Core architecture, still unable to compete with AMD in the desktop market, they devloped it again in to the Core 2 architecture (called Conroe). Finally Intel had a better performing CPU than AMD, and they were going to use it to stuff AMD as much as possible and try and gain the market back as much as possible. So for the last year we've been caught in a price was between Intel and AMD.
AMD, after 1 year, are about to finally respond and release their own new architecture (Barcelona), it does a lot of the things the Core2 line did to become so fast, but as of yet now real official benchmarks or well done independent benchmarks have come out. This will be released to their server market and later in the year a similar CPU architecture (Agena) will be released to the desktop market. Intel will be releasing their new die refresh, (they're going from 65 nanometres to 45 nanometres), while there are some architecture improvements, it looks like without SSE4 optimization (a new instruction set they are introducing), it will only average about 5% faster than their current CPUs.
