Anyone who knows a little ... I wouldn't call 'Joe Average'
Most of us with friends and family can understand the basics of a computer, and most certainly can see price/performance differences between Intel and AMD.
a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing
basically if AMD continues the way they are going, they have a fairly good chance of making their name a much larger accepted brand.
HOWEVER, IMHO, if they bumped it up higher, made it clear to everyone that they don't want to play second fiddle to Intel (they clearly are not to the enthusiast), by doing what we are all wanting: massive CPU speed increases, coupled with some real high bandwidth motherboards.
the other side is this: AMD doesn't look at things like that. they see profits in the mid term future. Long term, if they didn't exhaust themselves by starting another mhz war, they'd come out in a better position, becuase with brand loyalty, even in a slump, you do well. in the short-medium term future, what they are doing is probably best.
Also, about the 'reliability' issue, it isn't REALLY different between Intel and AMD though AMD tends to have issues that Intel doesn't, simply becuase MS doesn't include patches, or anything like that for VIA chipsets.
one interesting thing I'd like to note, is that my friend had a bad experience with a Geforce card (he's very much into programming, though for some reason he had a problem with this). He bought it when it first came out, but AFAIK, had some sort of driver problems, becuase he said to me he didn't see any improvement in game performance over his S3 Trio card (either that, or he never enabled hardware acceleration mode in his games). The thing is, I tend to agree with him, on the reliability/ease of use issue for nVidia cards. I lended him my 3dfx Voodoo Banshee for about 6 months, and he was simply amazed by it. it simply worked, and that's the difference that I saw between nVidia and 3dfx. nVidia catered to the tweaker (both a good and bad thing), but 3dfx simply worked. for me, it's convenient not to have to troubleshoot my computer at all (I find things are VERY easy on my 2 computers now, I barely ever have to fix a problem), but it's also nice to be able to push the limits of performance. I've never run an nVidia card though, so I have not personal experience with them, but I'd have to say that I probably could handle it easily enough (if there ever was a problem), though I can't say the same about Joe Average users.
Mark did not want to discuss the architectural enhancements of the Palomino, but he confirmed that the chip has several architectural enhancements which boost performance. Also interesting was the claim that several applications will see a significant boost. Our industry sources say that the Palomino definitely has hardware prefetch, and we bet it has improved branch prediction too. These two features make the Palomino a very good server CPU, for example, to run TP (Transaction Processing) applications.
I personally was under the impression that AMD was saving their performance tweaks for the Thoroughbred (larger pipe to the cache, higher quality branch predictor (ala K6-2), and numerous others that I don't have a clue about seeing as I know nothing about this field). however, if they delay Palomino so much, it might either push back the thoroughbred, or become one with Thoroughbred (so they don't push back their Sledge/Clawhammer launch).
the P4 currently has not put monkey wrench in AMD's plans, in fact, it has only really let them out for an extra week's vacation. why? Intel was counting on a pattern that was obviously wrong. now that people have a taste of cheap power (relatively, compared to before the Pentium), they don't want the P4 and it's new RAM. most don't even want DDR SDRAM on AMD's athlon (though the switchover is inevitable), at least they have a choice. Intel's P3 has continued to be their only saving grace, but it isn't going any faster.
becuase of this so called depression (I could type up a storm on that too), AMD is playing their cards conservitavely, which guarantees more profits (why release the Palomino, when you can still make money on this current gen?). Whether or not that'll help stimulate the economy is probably NO, seeing as it doesn't generate interest. HOWEVER, seeing as AMD doesn't have to charge an arm and a leg (nor does intel, but they have more incentive to do so) for their chips, they don't have to release it, only to find that it's a flop, like the P4 before it, becuase it's compatable with most current chipsets, requiring less of an investment in the enthusiast community, and still bumping up the speed grade for the joe average popularity. Joe average, will probably not buy it, if the P4 is any indication, unless it is low cost.
there are many things I wanted to say, but don't have too much time to say. I agree with Modus, Wingnut, and seewhy, on most of the issues.