Quad FX - or is it Quad just for effect

Reviews and pricing for 4x4 are out comparing it to Kentsfield. Here are some of them:

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_athlon_64_fx_74_4x4/default.asp
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTIzMyw1LCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/11/30/brute_force_quad_cores/page13.html
http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=911&cid=1

I'm not the right guy to dissect the technical details but there are two things I was expecting:

1. This will be a power hungry, large and loud beast of a system. Which is correct.
2. That this would be a hard kick in the performance cojones for Kentsfield. Which to my astonishment is not correct.

From a pricing standpoint...this thing is priced extremely agressively (in pairs):

2 x FX70 = $599
2 x FX72 = $799
2 x FX74 = $999

Considering the FX62 is at 713$, this is quite a steep price drop. However, the issues with the system price overall is the cost of the mobo and the fact that there is only one supplier - Asus. My hypothesis is that AMD knows at this point Quad FX is only a marketing ploy. It is not a market winning solution until they bring out Barcelona. Hence, they do not want to enable all their partners at this stage until they have a better sense of whether they want to market Barcelona by itself or as part of Quad FX.

Having seen that the performance is not spanking Kentsfield, I think Intel will now accelerate their quad core ramp. They will bring pricing further down in Q107. Their intent will be the same as it was on dual core. To make quad core mainstream faster than expected and hence place supply and capacity pressure on AMD. Their hope will be AMD cannot ramp Barcelona fast enough and Quad FX is hardly a mainstream desktop solution. Hence, customers (starting with channel I guess) will once again feel AMD is unable to meet their needs.

So do expect Kentsfield to drop below 999$ in Q1. I'd assume this will be accompanied with a new SKU with a higher clock speed just to land a 1-2 punch on AMD.

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UPDATE

Anandtech in his review shows a Quad COre at 2.4GHz in Q1 priced at $851. So Intel will bring Quad Core mainstreamish fast.

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2879&p=3

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 2.66GHz 4MB per 2 cores $999
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600** 2.40GHz 4MB per 2 cores $851
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 2.93GHz 4MB $999

I suspect the scenarios AMD is playing with right now are:

1. If Barcelona kicks Conroe's performance and perhaps more importantly performance/watt ass then 4x4 will die an unnoticed death.

2. However, if Barcelona does not completely wipe the floor with Conroe. Even if it's better but only marginally better then AMD will increase the focus on 4x4 and try and bring platform price and thermals down. They may even introduce dual core flavours of Barcelona (not sure if this is already on their public plans) to drop into 4x4 just as Intel is potentially introducing single core versions of Conroe for the lower end of the market.

Of course, everyone (including me) are assuming Barcelona will wipe Conroe off the map. But I was also expecting 4x4 to do the same to Kentsfield and that is not the case so let's assume nothing till we see it for ourselves.