Originally Posted by caligula
Mark these words: with their new K8L architecture, AMD won't be able to release mid-range processors with the same price/performance like E6300 for example (which will be at a lower price than now and will get a special price cut as a "coupe de grace" or last nail in the coffin for AMD). A quick salvage for them would be to finally introduce 2MB/cache/core - and even with this they won't get even unless their cache is still accessed at half the width Conroe has. They will first release K8L on high-end and server market, where, especially on the latter, is Intel land. Poor OS support, corporate holdback (remember how many years took AMD64 to become adopted in server environments), high prices, small number of initial lab rats willing to buy will make their release as "hey, really nice but who's buying?". Ridiculously trying to save their smashed pride with throwing "leaked previews" of K8L infrastructure, which mainly introduces nifty gizmos like offloading engines for XML (which will stay offline for most of the time) was definitely a bad move. Who cares you say that you will drive a S-klasse Mercedes in 10 years from now on, when you still have your '99 Honda Civic and you get smoked by a guy in a Maseratti ? Even worse, lots of people start driving Maserattis :)
But, until late 2007 AMD has big chances that it will be history.
If they don't come up with a new something (I dunno, but they should do something), they will lose the train for good. like ATI does for the last 3 generations of GPUs.
Sorry AMD fans, but this is no soccer, when it comes to figures you lost.