In last few years it looked like AMD lost its bearings in CPU market. No one expected that company, that is in constant transition, financial problems and without complete product portfolio, can produce interesting, equivalent and concurrent product. Phenom CPUs with K10 micro architecture didn't claim speed crown from Intel, but they were significant step forward compared to "worn out" K8 cores. We must be aware of the fact that every processor is result of compromise between investments and goals. Probably K10 would be better product if it had larger L2 and L3 cache memory, with better and larger Branch Target Buffers, with different cache policies that are favoring intensive operations with cache memory, but in that case Phenom, that was manufactured in 65nm process, wouldn't give adequate results.