AMD's Hammer Architecture - Making Sense of it All

When AMD first revealed the K7 architecture at the Microprocessor Forum in 1998 who would have thought that the Athlon would turn out to be this successful? This two-year old micro architecture from AMD has been able to dethrone Intel's Pentium III and make many users think twice before adopting the Pentium 4 platform. Today the Athlon XP boasts the highest desktop performance of any x86 processors and it does so based on the K7 architecture that was originally introduced at MPF.

Fast forwarding to the present day; AMD has gained a significant amount of market share and at this year's MPF the underdog in green introduced the details of their next-generation microprocessor architecture under the "Hammer" codename.

Knowing what you do about the stellar performance of the Athlon and its humble beginnings at MPF '98, what can AMD possibly do to surpass their present achievements?