You didn’t really think that Intel was going to let AMD get away with all of that boasting about the upcoming native quad Barcelona [1], did you? It turns out that, much like hip-hop mogul Jay-Z, Intel is “in love with a V dub engine.” Following Barcelona’s recent POV benchmark score of just over 4000, Intel decided to throw down some benchmarks of its own: 4933 for a “V8″ 3.0 GHz 8-core (2-socket quad-core) system. This is bad news for AMD because these are Clovertown CPUs that Intel is using–which means that 8 Intel cores based on current-gen technology can outperform 16 cores from AMD’s next-gen platform. Couple this with the production problems that AMD is likely to face in the coming months [2] and you’ve got a pretty grim outlook for the underdog of the processor world.

For more on the latest benchmarks:
– see this ZDnet blog entry [3]