Except, it doesn't smoke any Intel Quad, at all.
Actually, it does. The i7 way outperforms the Phenoms - but I'm talking the old "Core" quad line.
You see, with the i7's - Intel actually got around to doing it right: true monolithic cores, and integrated memory controllers. AMD has been doing this for a while now. When you look at overall performance including memory access and peripheral/bus access - the Phenoms were ahead of the old Intel quads (which were just hacked-together dual core CPUs).
Unless you were comparing your OC'ed CPU to a stock Intel
I was.
It's kinda sad to see AMD's latest best offering that's 2 months old barely managing to compete with a 2 year old chip...
It's kind of sad to see a giant such as Intel following in AMD's architectural footsteps. Like I and others have said: "Intel works harder, AMD works smarter"