I think one of amd:s problem is that for convincing investors (or something) they start talking about unreleased products years and years before the launch. They should propably stop doing that so that competition would not have any products to response at the launch date (now competition has many years to think competing products for K12).

I might be wrong but i think the ATI side of the company has covered up their future products bit better and therefore many Radeons have been positive suprises in terms of performance.