Intel over AMD

[HardwareGuru]

Since the release of Core 2 processors, Intel clock for clock is able to outperform the Athlon 64 line of CPUs. However, Intel has not implemented Hypertransport yet, what is the main areas of the Core 2 line that makes it able to beat Athlon 64 cpus? The Pentium 4 line had deeper pipelining where it does less instruction per clock. Now, Intel has reduced the pipelining and made it at 14 stages. Now it can perform more instruction per clock. Intel also increased memory in the cache. What other areas have Intel adjusted or included that gained the edge over AMD?

 

[Chombo]

Larger shared L2 cache and smaller die size I believe.

 

[Mithent]

The Core architecture is basically the merger of the best features from the Pentium 4 Netburst architecture with Yonah, a mobile processor that was a distant descendant of the Pentium III (and, further back, the Pentium Pro's P6 architecture). It therefore has the shorter pipeline and more advanced design of Yonah combined with the advanced branch prediction, 64-bit extensions and better FPU performance of the P4, plus extra optimisations etc.. It has more in common with Yonah than the Netburst architecture that the Athlon series so handily beat, though.

 

[Scali2]

The pipeline is still longer than that of the Athlon and Phenom processors, which means it has the potential to clock higher. That will be an advantage in the future, but so far Intel has not pushed the architecture much, because there is no need. Overclockers know how easily they can be pushed beyond 3 GHz though, showing the potential of the architecture.

Other than that Intel has a far more mature manufacturing process... Their 65 nm is really efficient, delivering good yields on high clockspeeds and low power consumption, and 45 nm is doing even better.
I'm sure that if Intel would manufacture the Athlon and Phenom chips, they'd be able to clock higher and consume less power, and also use more cache, increasing performance. The architectures themselves aren't all that different, the main difference is in the manufacturing, and the larger caches are a result of that (and Intel also has a slightly more efficient cache design).