The latest battle in an old war? No, not sectarian violence in Baghdad. It's AMD vs. Intel. As I've said before, the Core 2 Duo has won Intel the performance crown, and they will begin agressively down-pricing their NetBurst chips. In order to stay competitive, AMD is cutting its costs too. After all, untill they can beat the Core 2 Duo, price will be their only option for competition. AMD's 1MB L2 cache in the X2 is toast. Unfortunately for performance, cache is expensive to add to the die. It's a MARGINAL COST in production; the more cache you have, the fewer chips per wafer of silicon one can manufacture (unless one drops to a smaller nm rating of manufacturing). Less chips per wafer boosts costs per chip, and thus we see AMD's problem. Although the on-board memory controller allows AMD to have much less cache than Intel in order to have comparable latency, any loss of cache will still cause a performance hit. On the bright side for AMD, its aquisition of ATI will save it millions of dollars per year (at least according to the press releases). Plus, ATI's access to AMD's production facilities will save much in FIXED COSTS, such as rent.