The game of leapfrogging

The game of leapfrogging has reached the big news portals. In this case the game between AMD and Intel. You cannot have the performance crown forever. For a time you lead and a year later your competion leads,two years later you lead again. The same problem we have with IBM. It seems that Intel has some nice competitive designs in their pockets (but crippled by an aging architecture).
But most notable is this piece:

The close of 2006 will see Intel in the lead by a little on most workloads at the 2S 4C level. At the 2S 8C level, if there ends up being a race, AMD will crush Intel, something that will continue at the 4S 8C and get downright abusive at 4S 16C. If I had to pigeonhole the year for a soundbite, I would say AMD almost all the way. Should they have anything in reserve that is not on the roadmaps I have seen, Intel will be in trouble.

I think, this is the reason Andy Bechtolsheim choosed Opteron for our x64-gear.