Bill Henkel (noemail@yahoo.com) on 12/29/11 wrote:
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>gallier2 on 12/20/11 wrote:
>> good enough is the worst brake in CPU developement
>
>There are always people with bigger problems or less patience, even though this
>isn't true in your particular case. I think the real problem for both AMD and Intel
>is that their new processors don't make most existing software run any faster.
>Also, for the first time ever, the latest version of Windows doesn't use more resources than its predecessor.

Windows 8 is being designed to be responsive on LESS powerful ARM CPU's.
The bloatware era is over, the top 10 requested features in Office by users are actually part of Office, people just can't find or figure out that the features they want are already in the product.

>Doug Siebert on 12/20/11 wrote:
>> Basically your option is a total gamble,
>> and unless everything went exactly
>> according to plan, and Intel was not able
>> to use their process generation and cash
>> advantage to take back the performance
>> lead, AMD would be bankrupt before they
>> could get another design out the door.
>
>Is making low-profit bargain bin chips a better strategy? AMD's products need
>differentiation from Intel's products that some group of customers will pay extra
>for. For mobile processors, a differentiator could be a high-quality low-power
>H.264 encoder. For desktops and workstations, a differentiator could be higher
>single thread performance rather than more cores per socket (e.g. a 6 GHz dual-core
>water-cooled processor). Another differentiator could be larger caches (e.g. 256
>MBytes of L4 cache on the processor socket). Another differentiator could be enabling
>3rd-party innovation by making the cache-coherency protocol on the HyperTransport
>bus publically available and royalty-free.
>
>Intel is adding more cores per socket so I think AMD should focus on single thread
>performance. If Intel was focused on single thread performance, then AMD should
>focus on more threads per socket. This is more profitable than trying to make a
>cheaper version of whatever Intel makes, especially when AMD's version just has a lower price, not a lower cost.

AMD's differentiation is graphics, half the Liano die is graphics and the CPU will continue to shrink in die share.
CPU tech has hit a brick wall, and most users do not need more than 4 threads. The CPU no longer matters as much, the war is moving to graphics, and AMD has better graphics.

Intel pre-annouced that they would miss sales targets by a billion dollars, AMD pre-announced that they would meet sales targets.
AMD's CPU's suck compared to Intel's, if CPU's mattered this would not have happened.