All the way AMD. Intel Sandy bridge South bridge scandal will cause Intel to decrease sales performance.
I think there is some credibility, Intel dropped prices on some i7's recently. Don't think it's twice as fast though I think AMD said 50% over Core2 .
Intel have got the name and they know it. Remember years ago with the Pentium 4? The Pentium 4 was actually slower than the Pentium 3 at the same clockspeed when it came out! (the socket 478 version that is). The Amd K6's and later Athlons were both cheaper and faster. It was around the time of a Pentium 3 that people bought Celeron's to save cost - a CPU that was similar in price to a standard AMD CPU. The Celerons were so woefully bad, they had no L2 cache! - simple tasks were often so slow and clunky, yet people insisted on buying these because they were 'Intel' instead of a cpu that was actually much faster than the full blown P3/P4, which would have cost the same! Its a shame AMD hasn't had a truly competitive CPU recently, I really hope the Bulldozer will make up for lost time. When the next gen Bulldozer comes along, I hope its sufficiently better than the one coming out to rival anything Intel can do with Ivy Bridge and beyond. Socket G2012 20 core+ bulldozer in late 2012 sounds kind cool (thats a server chip mind you)...
What I do know is that if the 50% over Core2 claim is valid it will put the Bulldozer right on par with Sandy Bridge, which is damn good news for customers. Can you say $100 Quadcore