Unless AM2 increases AMD's performance per clock by like 15% , Intel will take the lead against AMD as long as AMD can't bring 65nm chips to market , though AMD's design is better and has more performance clock per clock , Intel will be able to push clocks much higher , have lower power consumption and have close performance per clock with their new Conroe cores and superior fab process.
If you look at
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2648 where they compare the new intel cpu against an AMD X2 , the intel reaches near the same performance per clock , Intel roadmaps claim CPUs clocked at 3.3GHZ for their high end chips , unless AMD can increase performance per clock and/or put out a 3 or 3.2ghz CPU on 90nm process they won't be able to compete.. and even if AMD could reach those clocks their power consumption will go up dramatically bieng on a larger process, though i think AMD does have something of the sort in mind, as socket AM2 supports higher power output than 939.
Nvidia's 7900 will rape ATI's card if it can be produced at 32 pipes in large numbers... a 12 or 16 pipe 7600 will utterly pwn the X1600 which already can barely beat the 6600gt .
ATI might take back the lead when their direct X 10 architecture is released in late 2006 , having had experience with the Xbox 360 GPU , DX10 is supposed to use unified shader pipelines in its cards like the 360 .
Vista will be cracked within a week of release...
Apple might release a boxed OS , but i highly doubt it .. Else someone will crack the OS to run on any 32 bit x86 machine .
Revolution will actually give Sony and Microsoft serious competition if the graphics aren't too much worse off than a 360 or PS3 ....
The games i'm looking forward to for this year :
Unreal 2007
Quake Wars
Half Life 2 : aftermath
Huxley (google it)
Star Wars : Empire at War
none of the above should dissapoint .. much ..
