You're joking, right?

Have you seen the amount of money they spend on R & D? It is enormous.

Keep it in perspective, AMD is still making a K7 and has no end in sight. The K8 is just a K7 in drag, much less of a design change than the Prescott was from the Northwood. On top of this, Intel has the Pentium M line and the Itanium line.

I think Intel is being a little disingenous about all this stuff. If you look closely at what they've done, it is not much more than two year intervals. You could argue the Pentium MMX could be called a microarchitectural change, the Pentium Pro, of course. Then the Pentium II, then the Pentium 4, then the Prescott, then the P8. So, from around 1995 or so until now, they've had six.

I think a lot of this is just going to be how Intel defines what a micro-architectural change is. Look at the K8, it is less of a change than a lot of those mentioned above, but AMD defined it as the next microarchitecture so it is. But, if you look at it, it is about the same type of change as the Pentium MMX (which had a longer pipeline, better superscalar performance, and added instructions), much less than the Pentium Pro vis-a-vis the Pentium, about the same as the Pentium II compared to the Pentium Pro, far less than Pentium 4 compared to the Pentium III, far less than the Prescott compared to the Northwood, and far less than the P8 compared to the Pentium 4.

So, I think it is all fluff. We've been seeing iterative updates every couple of years, or major changes, for a long time. Intel is probably just going change the emphasis more. Of course, I could be wrong, but considering how long it takes to design a processor, a two year cycle is impossible unless a lot is borrowed from the predecessor for at least some of the iterations.

I find both rating easy to understand, AMD's can be quite difficult when the ratings are similar, where the difference in some software are more significant than what the rating says, but other than that, both Intel's and AMD's ratings are good enough.