AMD need to start pulling rabits of out hats if they want to close the gap on their rival. A 6-core desktop CPU coming out before Intel's offering may help very slightly but importantly would be a major PR coup.

I was going to buy one of these as my Christmas present. What do I do? Is there something better about to come out at the same price point? Will the 965 fall or rise in price if it's discontinued? I can see why AMD don't like to encourage rumours like this - makes it very difficult for us customers to decide what to do.

@Matt -- don't worry. People use home PCs for four things:

1. Basic office work

2. Web browsing

3. Entertainment

4. Limited content creation

Of course, number one hardly needs more than one core. Number two can benefit from two of them (browser+flash), number 3 will benefit from more cores (more and more games are springing up to take advantage of multiple cores). Of course, 4 is going to take advantage of all the cores your PC can muster.

And multiple cores make for a future-proof investment -- most applications are written to take advantage of multithreading and it is the current paradigm. Even if a dual-core CPU is fine today, it may not be enough in a month or two. If the current HD movies can tax one core if you don't have hardware acceleration, future movies might tax four of them. Sucks to be you if you don't have multiple cores then.

And multiple cores help out a lot in normal usage, too. With more of them, you're able to be browsing, listening to music, running flash and no stuff in the background will disrupt your work (including e.g. virus scanners).

Six might be overkill at the moment, but people will eventually find use for them. And individual cores can idle quite nicely, Windows 7 scheduler is supposedly written to be aware of an idling core and will not assign a workload to it if it would be underperforming.

@h4rm0ny -- AMD wouldn't shoot themselves in a foot like that. They need a well-rounded lineup and new parts should be forthcoming.

@Gary F -- I read online that AMD is well able to create their own i5/i7 equivalent, problem being price given current AMD market share. Magny-Cours and Sao Paolo are supposed to close the gap, and if Intel screws up: 1) by focusing too much on the integrated GPU in Sandy Bridge, 2) if 32 nm ends up too expensive to manufacture and as a result offers no tangible benefit compared to the price point*, Bulldozer might very well end up faster than future chips from Intel.

*) And it's not far-fetched, too -- analysts point to the fact that 32 nm might be too expensive to manufacture, especially at first.