Richard Cownie (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on February 2, 2013 7:50 pm wrote:
>
> Yes. But the example of AMD shows that a competitor even with far fewer resources
> and inferior manufacturing can produce better products from time to time
> (K8, Bobcat) by good design. Add more competitors, and the times when you beat
> everybody will not be so common.
>

IMHO, Bobcat is more like counter-example to your claim.
Bobcat (esp. C-series) clearly suffered from staying on 40-nm process for too long.
When Intel's Cedar Trail came out, it completely wiped C-series Bobcat out of 10'' netbooks. By now Bobcat survives only in "less interesting" 12'' netbooks and (barely) in dirt-cheap notebooks. And that happened even without Intel porting Atom to up-to-date 25nm process node.
I'd think, it would be different were Bobcat utilizing AMD's traditional uArch-process co-development.