>Regrettably, AMD could have been a contendah if their CPU core design had been
>a performer. (When will these companies learn that long pipe, high frequency hot
>rod designs are more hot than rod? AMD made a killing off the Pentium 4!) They
>were strategically the best placed among Intel / AMD / NVidia to capture the portable
>market. I don't think another opportunity like that is going to come for a while.

What would AMD really bring to the table here? Lots of SoC companies (Samsung, TI, Marvell) make very competitive designs just licensing cores (e.g. Cortex-A8/A9) from ARM. Qualcomm does their own processor designs, but does it really give them a big leg up in the marketplace?

Even if AMD could get a significant, say 20-30% processor core power improvement out of an ARM design, I'm not sure how much of a real competitive advantage that would be, since the "rest of the system" consumes the lion's share of power.

So the only other possible advantage AMD might have is their graphics division. Here, the question is, can they scale down their GPU designs to the low-power, low memory bandwidth constraints inherent to tablets and smartphones? Imagination's PowerVR designs might have an inherent advantage here because of their tile-based deferred rendering.

IIRC, Bobcat has 16 pipeline stages, while the Cortex-A8 has 13 and the Cortex-A15 has 15 stages, so it's not that out of line with the competition.