Quote Originally Posted by nemrod
You can't compare K6 period and actual period because new Fab, new technology costs explode. I don't hope amd go bankrupt but I'm not sure you could refer to the past to say they will not go. If they have not enought money they can't invest enought for the future
People seem to assume no one is buying AMD hardware because they're not on top. Such is not the case. Your average consumer thinks with his wallet first and benchmark numbers second, if he's even savvy enough to look at those rather than following whatever he read in a magazine or saw in an ad. Having a less competitive project doesn't mean you go out of business, otherwise every industry in the world would have only one player.

That said I think AMD's acquisition of ATi was probably not the best timed, and ATi's poor position competing with nVidia is a part of that. I don't see AMD's business plan being in the enthusiast sector, I see it being in servers and 'least common denominator' PCs.

Think about it-- AMD stands to create a line of ICs that essentially are a desktop version of what's so popular in mobile devices, a System-on-a-Chip. A multi-core CPU, a modest GPU, and a northbridge all in one; a southbridge could easily be integrated too. You're looking, then, at AMD producing a chip that composes the vast majority of the components in your average PC. Sold at low cost to OEMs/System builders, they could really stand to clean up. That sort of innovation may very well lead to tiny ITX-style machines (well, look at DTX!) at extremely low prices, low power consumption (look at Geode) .... it's not hard to see where they're going with this. That's potential market share not to be scoffed at, even if it doesn't win benchmark comparisons against Intel.

Guess who sells the most GPUs? .. It's not nVidia or ATi/AMD .. it's Intel and their onboard video. So imagine the kind of market share AMD could have if they are selling boards with an onboard AMD-made CPU, chipset, GPU, northbridge, and a handful or two of small parts (capacitors, resistors, etc.) and all the OEM needs to supply is a case, PSU, HDD and optical drive? I think you see what I'm getting at here.