First, I want to ask about this:
QUOTE
The thing is, that all the money to be made will be in the mid range and even if Intel do come out with the conroe chip which well may be faster than the FX-60. people would rather buy the top range old 939 than a brand new conroe.
Why do you think this? Any dual core S939 is still at or above $300 (I found a one-day sale on the x2 3800 for $297 + shipping at NewEgg) and would be handily spanked by a $250 Conroe part at 2.13ghz. If an FX-60 with the bigger cache and higher FSB can't keep up with a 2.4ghz Conroe, why do you think a more expensive A64 at 2ghz on an "old" socket layout is going to compete with a cheaper 2.13ghz Conroe on a new socket that will last longer?
Now, about this part:
QUOTE
Also AMD is still using 90nm process whereas Intel have had to go down to 65nm just to even try and compete. I have a feeling when AMD go down to 65nm you will soon see intel being put to shame again
I hope you really don't think lithography process (65nm, 90nm) has much to do with the actual
processing performance of any processor. It surely makes the die smaller, which makes it cheaper to manufacture. It also can help somewhat with clock speeds, but they aren't going for uber clockspeeds anymore.
Conroe (and Merom) speed increases come from a redesign in how instructions are handled and processed. Intel spent a ton of time focusing on Instruction Level Parallelism, memory latency issues, ALU resources, macro- and micro-ops fusion (taking smaller instructions that might otherwise plug up individual ALU resources or break an OOO processing cycle and making them one bigger instruction that can complete much faster). These are the sorts of things that actually matter, versus just turning up the clockspeed and hoping lithography can keep up (which was Intels' prior methodology that sucked so bad with Prescott)
Now consider Intels' new focus on driving down power consumption... Their top of the line Core 2 Extreme (biggest and baddest Conroe they are going to release) has a TDP of 75W; the standard 2.4ghz Conroe will come in at 65W. This is almost half of the heat they're currently pumping with the PrescHOTts and ~40% less than the TDP of AMD's FX60 that the standard Conroe 2.4ghz beats thoroughly in performance.
Here's some helpful reading:
Anandtech's writeupRealWorldTech's writeupArsTechnica's writeup