The end of AMD

[bfdd]

I've yet to see a 3870 at 220.... everyone i've seen is 249.99 at the cheapest up to 269.99. I've seen 8800GTs at 249.99 also. So... They're direct competitors if you find a place that isn't gouging for either.

edit- BTW I'm a pretty big fan of the 3870 with prices going to go down and it having almost equal performance to the 8800GT it's not a buy people should pass up since it's easier to find than the 8800GT.

 

[fire400]

I think AMD sat around too long and got way too comfy with their X2's and Althon FX class processors.

The merge seemed to not be in it's most perfect timing.

 

[trajan2050]

Originally posted by: Aiden
For most mainstream users, the 3850/3870 are a much more attractive option then the 8800GT ,



This is wishful thinking. The 8800 GT in both the 512 and 256 version crush the 3870 and 3850 by an average 22%. The 8800gt 256 will be under $200. Supply issues will be resolved shortly. And more news on the AMD front:

http://www.digitimes.com/systems/a20071122PD214.html

Asustek Computer has adjusted its notebook strategy to increase the proportion of Intel's Santa Rosa Refresh and Montevina platforms up to 90% of its notebook shipments, while dropping AMD-based platforms from 30% to around 10%, according to sources at the company.
Asustek expects its notebook shipments in 2007 will increase to 7.2 million units, with branded notebooks occupying 4.2 million of the total, noted the company sources.

Asustek aims to become one of the top-five notebook vendors worldwide in 2010 and a top-three vendor in 2013, according to the company.

That is a lot of lost sales.

 

[TekGmr]

I agree with that statement. Does anyone remember 3DFX? They were on top of the world and dominated the market. They ushered in the age of 3D gaming on the PC. No one could believe that they would ever fall but they did. They couldn't keep up with the technological advances of their competitors and they fell hard because of it. Much like AMD ushered in the 64bit era of computing and the "performance per watt" philosophy that Intel is now living by. Their competition is also out pacing them technologically with continual and aggressive die shrinks.

Believe it of not AMD's headed down a long dark road and if they don't lean out the company and maximize the cost/profit ratio then their gonna be in a world of hurt. They need to stay as small and agile as possible to compete. Because that's how they were competitive in the first place.

 

[TheOtherRizzo]

Originally posted by: rchiu
We tech geeks like to predict if a company survive or fall based on the technology or product. But in reality how the company is run overall determines if a company will be successful.

Bingo. What exactly happened to Intel vs AMD sales while Intel only had the poor P4 to put up against AMD 64? What happened is that the biggest computer retailer in the world, Dell, wasn't even selling AMD!

There are so many other important factors to being a successful hardware company than actually making good products. Problem is that this fact isn't likely to help AMD...

 

[rchiu]

Originally posted by: Viditor

Originally posted by: rchiu


Well, no accounting is gonna hide the fact that AMD is bleeding cash from it's operations. Last quarter it lost $371 mil from operating activities. If it's operation continue to lose money like that, it won't survive for long.

You'd be surprised...

Last quarter, AMD had an Operating loss of $226 Million...but of that loss, $352 Million was for depreciation (which isn't a cash loss at all).
As for cash, at the end of Q2 they had a total of $1.594 Billion in cash and short term investments, and at the end of Q3 they had $1.528 Billion (a burn rate of only $66 Million).

In addition, since that Q3 report, they received the $681 Million for the stock sale which gives them (not counting income from sales) a total of $2.2 Billion in cash and short term investments.
And there's more...
1. They are due to receive a $387 Million subsidy from the EU for Fab 38
2. They are receiving another $500 Million from Russian company Angstrem for equipment and licenses of their 130nm process.

I was talking about the statement of cash flow, which take stuff like depreciation depreciation into consideration and shows how much cash they actually lost from the operation. The number I cited was actually for 3 quarter, so I guess losing ~$370 mil in that period wasn't as bad as I thought. But the point is, they cannot continue to lose cash from their operation, they cannot raise cash forever from other activities like selling plants, borrowing more debt or issuing more stock, their main operations has to generate cash someway, somehow.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: TheOtherRizzo

Originally posted by: rchiu
We tech geeks like to predict if a company survive or fall based on the technology or product. But in reality how the company is run overall determines if a company will be successful.

Bingo. What exactly happened to Intel vs AMD sales while Intel only had the poor P4 to put up against AMD 64? What happened is that the biggest computer retailer in the world, Dell, wasn't even selling AMD!

There are so many other important factors to being a successful hardware company than actually making good products. Problem is that this fact isn't likely to help AMD...

A company trying to sell terrible products will fail no matter what, even if they have a bunch of geniuses in their head office (not that AMD's products are terrible...simply somewhat un-competetive).

AMD did not have the capacity to provide Dell with the CPUs they need (and I would venture a guess that if *all* the CPUs Dell sold were AMD, they still could not keep up with demand to this day).

Really with the level of competition in this market, you need to have good products *and* good management. 3DFX is testament to that (they had decent products and terrible management...and down they went).

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: CTho9305

Originally posted by: taltamir
No one ever beleives a disaster will really happen... except for a few "paranoid nutcases" here and there...
Katrina? WTC? The Tsunami? Hitler? Stalin? The collapse of the sovient union (it ended up resulting in some improvement, but the fact the government collapsed instead of reformed made things really bad)? The great depression? I can just go and list almost every disaster EVER and nobody truely beleived it will happen... I wouldn't bring any FUTURE examples because that will make this go into politics FAST.

I will however say that all signs point to AMD closing shop, I expected them to do so monthes ago...

Did you short-sell some AMD shares / buy some "put" options? (Just curious how confident you are in this).

I don't gamble.
I will buy stock in stable companies after a stock crash.
I will buy stock when I am successful enough to try a hostile take over.

I am not gambling by buying and selling stock based on my assumption of them going up or down.

 

[fire400]

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: TheOtherRizzo

Originally posted by: rchiu
We tech geeks like to predict if a company survive or fall based on the technology or product. But in reality how the company is run overall determines if a company will be successful.

Bingo. What exactly happened to Intel vs AMD sales while Intel only had the poor P4 to put up against AMD 64? What happened is that the biggest computer retailer in the world, Dell, wasn't even selling AMD!

There are so many other important factors to being a successful hardware company than actually making good products. Problem is that this fact isn't likely to help AMD...

A company trying to sell terrible products will fail no matter what, even if they have a bunch of geniuses in their head office (not that AMD's products are terrible...simply somewhat un-competetive).

AMD did not have the capacity to provide Dell with the CPUs they need (and I would venture a guess that if *all* the CPUs Dell sold were AMD, they still could not keep up with demand to this day).

Really with the level of competition in this market, you need to have good products *and* good management. 3DFX is testament to that (they had decent products and terrible management...and down they went).

"while Intel only had the poor P4 to put up against AMD 64?"
-64-bit versions of Windows was not widespread at the time, namely WinXP x64.
-Longhorn, now named Vista is replacing WinXP x32 and x64, as evidence from Microsoft's marketting goals, over time that is.
-the Pentium 4 outperformed Athlon 64's in many multitasking benchmarks, but did not match up in the gaming performance benchmarks.
-by the time the X2's were released, Intel had already boasted immense Pentium D sales with far better advertising and competed very well with their Intel Core Duo chips.
"...dual core, do more" -clearly Intel had the upper hand, and the X2's are selling pretty well, but at embarrasing costs to the company especially when Core2 chips and Core2 Quads are dominating the mainstream/highend processor industry.

-the poor P4 you're talking about will be evolving heavily as underground Intel teams continue to put more work into it's vastly parallel research teams of the P3/core1/core2/quad architecture and P4/PD architecture.

-one thing is also clear. Intel has far more effective advertising than AMD, possibly many generations ahead in the battle field of defined target market and power control.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: fire400
"while Intel only had the poor P4 to put up against AMD 64?"
-64-bit versions of Windows was not widespread at the time, namely WinXP x64.
-Longhorn, now named Vista is replacing WinXP x32 and x64, as evidence from Microsoft's marketting goals, over time that is.
-the Pentium 4 outperformed Athlon 64's in many multitasking benchmarks, but did not match up in the gaming performance benchmarks.
-by the time the X2's were released, Intel had already boasted immense Pentium D sales with far better advertising and competed very well with their Intel Core Duo chips.
"...dual core, do more" -clearly Intel had the upper hand, and the X2's are selling pretty well, but at embarrasing costs to the company especially when Core2 chips and Core2 Quads are dominating the mainstream/highend processor industry.

-the poor P4 you're talking about will be evolving heavily as underground Intel teams continue to put more work into it's vastly parallel research teams of the P3/core1/core2/quad architecture and P4/PD architecture.

-one thing is also clear. Intel has far more effective advertising than AMD, possibly many generations ahead in the battle field of defined target market and power control.

The Phenom is a worse engineering failure than the P4 was IMO. The P4 at least won a good chunk of the benchmarks upon its release. That said, it is interesting to look back upon how much better the P4C was compared to the original. Perhaps the Phenom can mature to that point as well. The only problem is that the P4C made the P4 suck less. It still sucked compared to the A64 (for most usage patterns).

I can, however, understand why people are comparing the Phenom to the P4. Both were considered somewhat radical designs, albeit for different reasons. Both underperformed at launch, and had many people calling them 'engineering failures'.

Here's the main problem for AMD...intel was the market leader by a country mile when they released the P4. They were guaranteed to sell the processors simply due to the overall demand in the market for chips. AMD could not produce enough CPUs to compensate for their increased demand. AMD is in no position to lose 10-20% marketshare to intel. This would be catastrophic (and many signs point to this being a very real possibilty during 2008).

 

[nyker96]

Originally posted by: fire400
I think AMD sat around too long and got way too comfy with their X2's and Althon FX class processors.

The merge seemed to not be in it's most perfect timing.

totally agree with this. Also AMD is not expecting such a strong competition from C2Ds at all. Considering how weak P4 was it wasn't a bad assessment at the time.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: nyker96

Originally posted by: fire400
I think AMD sat around too long and got way too comfy with their X2's and Althon FX class processors.

The merge seemed to not be in it's most perfect timing.

totally agree with this. Also AMD is not expecting such a strong competition from C2Ds at all. Considering how weak P4 was it wasn't a bad assessment at the time.

It WAS a bad assessment at the time... the P4 was conceived by marketers. It had very high Ghz but was actually slower clock for clock then a P3.

To expect that intel, in the face of overwhelming competition, will continue to produce new chips that are weaker then previous ones, but have a higher artificial measurement for speed as a marketing gimmic was a mistake.

Intel simply scrapped the netburst archetecture, took their mobile archeticture which was p3 based and slightly better then a p3 and retooled it for the desktop calling it core. and then started getting serious about creating compedative products.

AMD for some reason expected intel to continue to make inefficient crappy cpus with really high frequencies as a marketing gimmic. They were wrong.

 

[Viditor]

Originally posted by: rchiu

Originally posted by: Viditor

Originally posted by: rchiu


Well, no accounting is gonna hide the fact that AMD is bleeding cash from it's operations. Last quarter it lost $371 mil from operating activities. If it's operation continue to lose money like that, it won't survive for long.

You'd be surprised...

Last quarter, AMD had an Operating loss of $226 Million...but of that loss, $352 Million was for depreciation (which isn't a cash loss at all).
As for cash, at the end of Q2 they had a total of $1.594 Billion in cash and short term investments, and at the end of Q3 they had $1.528 Billion (a burn rate of only $66 Million).

In addition, since that Q3 report, they received the $681 Million for the stock sale which gives them (not counting income from sales) a total of $2.2 Billion in cash and short term investments.
And there's more...
1. They are due to receive a $387 Million subsidy from the EU for Fab 38
2. They are receiving another $500 Million from Russian company Angstrem for equipment and licenses of their 130nm process.

I was talking about the statement of cash flow, which take stuff like depreciation depreciation into consideration and shows how much cash they actually lost from the operation. The number I cited was actually for 3 quarter, so I guess losing ~$370 mil in that period wasn't as bad as I thought. But the point is, they cannot continue to lose cash from their operation, they cannot raise cash forever from other activities like selling plants, borrowing more debt or issuing more stock, their main operations has to generate cash someway, somehow.

I agree with you that they can't continue to lose money, and that the once-off boosts in income are merely stop-gap measures. There's no doubt that AMD has had a God-awful year this year...
But considering the circumstances, they weathered this last year better than anyone expected they would.
AMD's trend for profit is going up, and that's before the 38x0 cards and any K10 income.
We shall see in January, but my guess is that AMD's Q4 is going to be FAR better than expected...

 

[Viditor]

Originally posted by: taltamir

I will however say that all signs point to AMD closing shop, I expected them to do so monthes ago...

Could you be specific as to what "signs" those are?

 

[Viditor]

Originally posted by: bfdd
I've yet to see a 3870 at 220.... everyone i've seen is 249.99 at the cheapest up to 269.99. I've seen 8800GTs at 249.99 also. So... They're direct competitors if you find a place that isn't gouging for either.

edit- BTW I'm a pretty big fan of the 3870 with prices going to go down and it having almost equal performance to the 8800GT it's not a buy people should pass up since it's easier to find than the 8800GT.

The 3870 has gone up recently, I assume due to high demand...
Just 2 days ago, there were several links to it at $219 (NewEgg was selling it for that)...

 

[Viditor]

Originally posted by: SickBeast
The Phenom is a worse engineering failure than the P4 was IMO. The P4 at least won a good chunk of the benchmarks upon its release. That said, it is interesting to look back upon how much better the P4C was compared to the original. Perhaps the Phenom can mature to that point as well. The only problem is that the P4C made the P4 suck less. It still sucked compared to the A64 (for most usage patterns).

Actually, the P4 had terrible sales in it's first few months...Willamette was even getting beat up by Durons for the first 5 months of it's life.

I can, however, understand why people are comparing the Phenom to the P4. Both were considered somewhat radical designs, albeit for different reasons. Both underperformed at launch, and had many people calling them 'engineering failures'.

Here's the main problem for AMD...intel was the market leader by a country mile when they released the P4. They were guaranteed to sell the processors simply due to the overall demand in the market for chips. AMD could not produce enough CPUs to compensate for their increased demand. AMD is in no position to lose 10-20% marketshare to intel. This would be catastrophic (and many signs point to this being a very real possibilty during 2008).

I have been hearing exactly that statement since mid 2006...it hasn't happened, nor do I expect it to. AMD's marketshare continues to increase, even with the K8...
Since the K10 is obviously superior to the K8, why would the Phenom X2s do worse than current X2s?

 

[Viditor]

Originally posted by: taltamir


AMD for some reason expected intel to continue to make inefficient crappy cpus with really high frequencies as a marketing gimmic. They were wrong.

I can promise you that this is completely wrong...AMD didn't underestimate anything or get comfy, or fall down on the job.
AMD was limited by it's resource constraints and vastly reduced sales from the recession in 2002...

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Viditor

Originally posted by: SickBeast
The Phenom is a worse engineering failure than the P4 was IMO. The P4 at least won a good chunk of the benchmarks upon its release. That said, it is interesting to look back upon how much better the P4C was compared to the original. Perhaps the Phenom can mature to that point as well. The only problem is that the P4C made the P4 suck less. It still sucked compared to the A64 (for most usage patterns).

Actually, the P4 had terrible sales in it's first few months...Willamette was even getting beat up by Durons for the first 5 months of it's life.

Right. I was referring to *engineering* failures, not marketing failures. :light:

I can, however, understand why people are comparing the Phenom to the P4. Both were considered somewhat radical designs, albeit for different reasons. Both underperformed at launch, and had many people calling them 'engineering failures'.

Here's the main problem for AMD...intel was the market leader by a country mile when they released the P4. They were guaranteed to sell the processors simply due to the overall demand in the market for chips. AMD could not produce enough CPUs to compensate for their increased demand. AMD is in no position to lose 10-20% marketshare to intel. This would be catastrophic (and many signs point to this being a very real possibilty during 2008).

I have been hearing exactly that statement since mid 2006...it hasn't happened, nor do I expect it to. AMD's marketshare continues to increase, even with the K8...
Since the K10 is obviously superior to the K8, why would the Phenom X2s do worse than current X2s?

AMD cut prices (and lost money) in order to gain that marketshare. It had nothing to do with having superior products.

As for your next question, the Phenoms could do worse than the X2s because of their high cost. In terms of performance per dollar, it's worse than the better portion of intel's offerings (and the X2).

Plus there's the fact that Phenom has a huge die size, which costs AMD more to make it (and hence makes it more difficult for them to sell them on the cheap).

 

[IdaGno]

I don't do audio/video encoding.
I don't do photoshop.
I don't do torrents.
I don't fold.

I rip some. I game some.

As much as possible, I go out of my way to avoid desktop multi-tasking and so can barely justify a dualie, let alone a 4 core CPU. Besides just taking them along for the ride, precisely what is one supposed to do with 4 cores? K10 dualie?

(There's a reason I never put two fours on the Pinto.)

 

[gorbs]

okay i have a question and i think it is related to this thread. if you all disagree i apologize up front. but in reading the posts you all seem WAY more knowledgable than i on these things. i am upgrading my current 478 socket and never had an AMD processor. i am not sure which is better for gaming. i am considering an AMD Black edition processor as i always wanted to build both an AMD and an Intel gaming rig.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/app...=CP1-AM2-5000B%20PROMO

or one of these

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16819115029

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16819115031



i already have an 8800 gt ready for the new build. should i stick with Intel core 2 duo or do the AMD build instead. this pc is strictly for gaming so thats what i need the new cpu to do for me, run my games well. my sig has my current build specs. my thoughts are that if i get a fast enough processor i wont need to overclock but it is nice to know that you can safely turn up the juice if need be.

 

[Viditor]

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: Viditor

Originally posted by: SickBeast
The Phenom is a worse engineering failure than the P4 was IMO. The P4 at least won a good chunk of the benchmarks upon its release. That said, it is interesting to look back upon how much better the P4C was compared to the original. Perhaps the Phenom can mature to that point as well. The only problem is that the P4C made the P4 suck less. It still sucked compared to the A64 (for most usage patterns).

Actually, the P4 had terrible sales in it's first few months...Willamette was even getting beat up by Durons for the first 5 months of it's life.

Right. I was referring to *engineering* failures, not marketing failures. :light:

[/quote]

Fair enough...but at it's launch, P4 was also (wrongly) thought to be an engineering failure.

I can, however, understand why people are comparing the Phenom to the P4. Both were considered somewhat radical designs, albeit for different reasons. Both underperformed at launch, and had many people calling them 'engineering failures'.

Here's the main problem for AMD...intel was the market leader by a country mile when they released the P4. They were guaranteed to sell the processors simply due to the overall demand in the market for chips. AMD could not produce enough CPUs to compensate for their increased demand. AMD is in no position to lose 10-20% marketshare to intel. This would be catastrophic (and many signs point to this being a very real possibilty during 2008).

I have been hearing exactly that statement since mid 2006...it hasn't happened, nor do I expect it to. AMD's marketshare continues to increase, even with the K8...
Since the K10 is obviously superior to the K8, why would the Phenom X2s do worse than current X2s?

[/quote]

AMD cut prices (and lost money) in order to gain that marketshare. It had nothing to do with having superior products.

Since Intel cut their prices equally, it should have nothing to do with gaining marketshare.
What is probably more important is that AMD's platforms are far more cost effective in the low end.

As for your next question, the Phenoms could do worse than the X2s because of their high cost. In terms of performance per dollar, it's worse than the better portion of intel's offerings (and the X2).

Plus there's the fact that Phenom has a huge die size, which costs AMD more to make it (and hence makes it more difficult for them to sell them on the cheap).

I think you're forgetting that the huge die is only on the X4s...and Kentsfield is actually larger.
To compare to the X2, we will need to know what the Phenom X2 die size is going to be...

 

[Phynaz]

Originally posted by: Viditor

Originally posted by: SickBeast
The Phenom is a worse engineering failure than the P4 was IMO. The P4 at least won a good chunk of the benchmarks upon its release. That said, it is interesting to look back upon how much better the P4C was compared to the original. Perhaps the Phenom can mature to that point as well. The only problem is that the P4C made the P4 suck less. It still sucked compared to the A64 (for most usage patterns).

Actually, the P4 had terrible sales in it's first few months...Willamette was even getting beat up by Durons for the first 5 months of it's life.

I can, however, understand why people are comparing the Phenom to the P4. Both were considered somewhat radical designs, albeit for different reasons. Both underperformed at launch, and had many people calling them 'engineering failures'.

Here's the main problem for AMD...intel was the market leader by a country mile when they released the P4. They were guaranteed to sell the processors simply due to the overall demand in the market for chips. AMD could not produce enough CPUs to compensate for their increased demand. AMD is in no position to lose 10-20% marketshare to intel. This would be catastrophic (and many signs point to this being a very real possibilty during 2008).

I have been hearing exactly that statement since mid 2006...it hasn't happened, nor do I expect it to. AMD's marketshare continues to increase, even with the K8...
Since the K10 is obviously superior to the K8, why would the Phenom X2s do worse than current X2s?

K10 = Dud.

It's not superior to anything.

 

[Cookie Monster]

K10 still seems to be borked with some problems from TLB issue to not being able to use the socket AM2+ advantage which basically is ability to run the L3 cache and NB at a higher frequency etc.
I dont see how this is a dud because the phenoms still outperform the K8 overall and i.e atleast AMD has released a somewhat competitive product where they can still improve.

Was it the end of intel when Prescott and later Prescott derivatives e.g Smithfield, Presler etc failed to win almost anything against the A64/X2s ?

It wouldve been a dud if it failed to even compete with its own K8 offerings.

To the thread, businesses just don't flop or fail because one of its current products fail to outperform its competition unless they have continously done so for several generations. One very good example is nVIDIA and the NV30 days. How did they survive that one? when not only its high end but from top to bottom they got beat cleanly by ATi. Now look at the present. ATi got brought out by AMD, while nVIDIA is threatening intel for the number 1 position in the graphics market according to the latest notes from Jon Peddie Research.

Look if the AMD ship sinks next year, ill gladly eat my hat.

edit - and any others that offer their hats

 

[JumpingJack]

Originally posted by: gorbs
okay i have a question and i think it is related to this thread. if you all disagree i apologize up front. but in reading the posts you all seem WAY more knowledgable than i on these things. i am upgrading my current 478 socket and never had an AMD processor. i am not sure which is better for gaming. i am considering an AMD Black edition processor as i always wanted to build both an AMD and an Intel gaming rig.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/app...=CP1-AM2-5000B%20PROMO

or one of these

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16819115029

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16819115031



i already have an 8800 gt ready for the new build. should i stick with Intel core 2 duo or do the AMD build instead. this pc is strictly for gaming so thats what i need the new cpu to do for me, run my games well. my sig has my current build specs. my thoughts are that if i get a fast enough processor i wont need to overclock but it is nice to know that you can safely turn up the juice if need be.

Well, you should read up on the reviews and do a little net searching to answer your question.

First, a gaming rig is more a choice of good GPU + decent CPU than the other way around, if you plan on high res gaming. The 8800 GTS is a good GPU, and an AMD is a decent CPU.

If you are asking which CPU currently crunches gaming code better -- the Intel Core 2 Duo does a significantly better job overall, but then there are the price points, you can do an AMD build 80 to 150 bucks cheaper but you will be left with somewhat slower overall performance.

This does not make AMD the bad choice, if your only purpose for owning a computer is gaming then you will not see much of a difference with today's games using the 5000+.

Of the CPUs you describe the 5000+ is the better choice, if you get the black edition, because you can simply up the multiplier one or two notches and get a faster CPU for the money... TigerDirect has the 5000+ for 99 bucks right now, a real deal.

 

[JumpingJack]

Originally posted by: Phynaz

Originally posted by: Viditor

Originally posted by: SickBeast
The Phenom is a worse engineering failure than the P4 was IMO. The P4 at least won a good chunk of the benchmarks upon its release. That said, it is interesting to look back upon how much better the P4C was compared to the original. Perhaps the Phenom can mature to that point as well. The only problem is that the P4C made the P4 suck less. It still sucked compared to the A64 (for most usage patterns).

Actually, the P4 had terrible sales in it's first few months...Willamette was even getting beat up by Durons for the first 5 months of it's life.

I can, however, understand why people are comparing the Phenom to the P4. Both were considered somewhat radical designs, albeit for different reasons. Both underperformed at launch, and had many people calling them 'engineering failures'.

Here's the main problem for AMD...intel was the market leader by a country mile when they released the P4. They were guaranteed to sell the processors simply due to the overall demand in the market for chips. AMD could not produce enough CPUs to compensate for their increased demand. AMD is in no position to lose 10-20% marketshare to intel. This would be catastrophic (and many signs point to this being a very real possibilty during 2008).

I have been hearing exactly that statement since mid 2006...it hasn't happened, nor do I expect it to. AMD's marketshare continues to increase, even with the K8...
Since the K10 is obviously superior to the K8, why would the Phenom X2s do worse than current X2s?

K10 = Dud.

It's not superior to anything.

Dud may be too strong, disappointing is more appropriate but the K10/Phenom will have it's place -- there are die-hard dedicated customers that will buy it if for anything else it is not Intel, then there are the AM2 upgraders who will buy it once stable BIOSes are demonstrated.

However, I tend to agree... as of this post.

- On averge the 9600 is about the same cost as the Q6600, yet under performs.
- Runs hotter
- Less overclockable
- Buggy (this actually may be good news, if they get bugs out and improve IPC/performance)
- Unfortunately only the 9500 is available at this time.

I guess if there is one bright spot, within app thread scaling appears to be slightly better, no doubt a benefit of the native quad design; however, the absolute performance even with all 4 threads running is still short the Q6600 clock for clock.... anytime you read 'true quad core peformance', everyone should cringe and a whisper of a voice in the dark corner of the mind's eye should say 'Marketing BS'.