In a bit of sad news for AMD fans, Hector Ruiz, Chief Executive for the company, has stated that K8L will not take off this year. K8L is the future answer to Core, and represents a significant change in architecture that could vastly improve the performance of AMD processors. That is something sorely needed right now, with the Core and its variants again and again winning the performance battle. However, AMD instead will continue to push their existing architecture for a while yet.
That doesn't mean they aren't going ahead with their plans for launches - just that propagation and adoption aren't going to be anything impressive. AMD is estimating it will be around 9 months to transition their desktop products to the new technology, whereas with Intel it was around 6 months to transition to Core. Given the blazing success of the Core as it stands and these figures, it could easily be early 2008 before we see them make a comeback.