We can because plenty of people fleeing AMD around that time frame said the company wasn't spending enough on R&D and wasting money on hookers and blow. The company didn't have a viable new architecture after Athlon. If Intel had literally done nothing shady from 2000-2006 AMD would've ended up in the same position as they are today, just a few years later than they did. AMD's mismanagement is a far bigger story than anything Intel did.
I completely disagree. If we take into account billions of dollars that AMD could have earned during 2000-2006, it would have meant that AMD's purchase of ATI wouldn't have required billions of leveraged and costly debt that AMD still carries to this date. The consequence of AMD not getting all that income and cash flow during Intel's anti-competitive business years is the massive amount of debt load that AMD incurred during the ATI acquisition
+ all the interest AMD paid on the portion of debt it took out to buy ATI that could have been paid for with the 2000-2006 earnings. So the total damages to AMD aren't simply measured in terms of its CPU architecture but billions of dollars in lost interest debt charges and subsequent reduction in R&D/engineering resources and marketing resources that were required to service all that debt.
To agree with your viewpoint would be akin to agreeing that if AMD magically got $3-5B of cash flow today, it wouldn't make any difference for the firm's going concern or its long-term strategy. For starters we know that if AMD had almost no debt, there is no way that NV would have gotten away with its Pay to Win GW business strategy because AMD would have had enough resources to balance out such business practices with many AMD GE titles. Furthermore, AMD would have had a lot more $ to hire the top engineers and many more engineers, as well as attract much more talent if talented executives were in a position to charter a solid strategy instead of wasting their time on loan refinancing, restructuring, lease buy-backs and spin-offs that are now
required to deal with hundreds of millions of interest rate charges on massive debts AMD incurred during the ATI acquisition (which would have been paid for with earnings of AMD from 2000-2006 years that Intel basically bribed away from AMD).
It the executive/senior management team is spending a large portion of their time worrying about the financial aspects of the firm, not the engineering or strategic aspects, it's much harder to execute and formulate a cohesive and strong competitive strategy. You haven't even taken into account that AMD could have developed stronger or new relationships with OEMs/buyers but since Intel blocked such possibility or prevented it from expanding, AMD never developed the strong supply chain and loyal customers for future business operations. Therefore, the opportunity loss of the $ AMD could have earned has far reaching consequences than simply Bulldozer or Phenom.
Imagine if Qualcomm was 50-75X the size of its closest competitor and bribed its way into all key smartphone design wins for 6+ years. How would that look for the competitive landscape of ARM eco-system today?
NV is getting $66M per quarter in pure cash settlement for some IP licensing (!) that isn't even a tangible revenue /customer cash flow stream but a blatant patent licensing fee based on the US's broken patent system. OTOH, AMD lost billions of dollars of highly likely potential cash flow streams from key OEMs by being purposely blocked out and manipulated out of the CPU market by a much larger player. That's not capitalism -- that's pure mafia state Russian-style business practices. In a properly monitored and law-abiding capitalist society, Intel's executives should go jail for such business practices. In other words if some measly NV IP licensing award to NV is $66M cash / quarter, the compensation to AMD for everything that Intel has done should have been in the
billions of dollars. Granted, Intel treated nV poorly too so NV does deserve some compensation but my point is NV to this date is getting $264M per year from Intel and this is basically going to be a re-curing fee for years to be re-negotiated in the future. What's AMD getting from Intel? $0.