Wow, I'm glad to know myself and the people I went up with weren't the only ones who thought the show in ATL was a joke. I had gotten up a group of about 15 people from Columbus (about a 2 hour drive) to check this out, and we all left fairly disappointed.
I actually work in the system builder market they're targetting, and most of the presentations even then were fairly worthless. The actual useful material that was presented could have been condensed easily into a couple of hours, instead of 5 1/2 hours of drawn out, repetitive content. Things like AMD's revised solution provider program and a few of Microsoft's new programs are worth knowing about, but I don't know that it was worth the time involved to get the information.
To top things off, two of the guys I went with were there to pick up a server bundle for their work and weren't allowed to take it since they had used their company credit card to order it, which had the accountant's name on it. Nevermind that all the confirmation paperwork was in their name, along with proof of ID ranging from his driver's license to work ID badges. The manager from AMD was a bit of a jerk about it, and didn't really even want to talk about it to them. The way it's looking now, that Opteron is going to be replaced with a Xeon based Dell simply because of the way these guys were treated by AMD reps at the show.
Personally, I'm about as big an AMD fanboy as you can get while still remaining somewhat rational, and rather than promote their product, it's left a bitter taste in my mouth, if anything. I'm glad I went ahead and pulled the trigger on the bundle, since without it, the trip would've been a complete waste of time. I was genuinely hoping to come away from this thing with some kind information I could put to use. Instead I walked away from hour upon excruciating hour of marketing drudge.
AMD definitely has the product to beat right now, but they're going to have to do a better job of learning to sell it if they want any kind of real success. If I feel this way about the show as someone who *wanted* to see the upside of it, I'd hate to think about how it must have looked to people who were already ambivalent about AMD product.