Is it just that AMD cant afford to have a sub $200 flagship? the 9850 is giving sub $200 performance in comparison to the q6600.

I admit being a bit on an AMD fanboy, but come on. I'd like to buy a better CPU, but only when it makes sense.

I had high hopes that the triple cores would be priced reasonably, like in the $100 range, but guess again.

My plan was to stick with AMD so I'd have the ability to keep on shuffling my CPUs around, but I wont pay a premium to do it.

Yes it is unfortunate to see AMD falling behind. However they do seem to be playing the graphics card market nicely with their ownership of ATI and now their recent partnership with Nvidia on hybrid SLI. Perhaps this will give AMD a good chance to become profitable again, which in turn would allow them to start pumping out good processors at reasonable prices.

Partnership with Nvidia? AMD has hybrid Crossfire with a 780G board and a 2400XT, 3450 or 3470. There's no ATI card that works in SLI with an Nvidia board.

Nvidia's hybrid SLI is a similar budget technology to boost IGP plus entry level discrete GPU performance. Both AMD and Nvidia have solutions that Intel doesn't match right now, but they're not compatible mix and match solutions.

There's no single standard, though I'd like to see one where ATI and Nvidia cards work together in dual card mode. Perhaps Intel will use Crossfire as the standard for their upcoming discrete cards and then Nvidia could be cajoled into agreeing to adopt Crossfire themselves?

What I said was that hybrid SLI is only available on an AMD chipset, so there was obviously some sort of agreement between AMD and Nvidia.
The point I was trying to make is that both hybrid SLI and Crossfire goes through only AMD, and is not available on Intel chipsets. This could be a good leverage point to put AMD back in competition with Intel.

I highly doubt Nvidia would go along with adopting Crossfire. SLI is their own multi-GPU solution that they can use to pull market share away from ATI/AMD. If games are programmed in such a way to favor SLI over Crossfire (which there are many of) then gamers have more of a reason to buy Nvidia. Nvidia would be passing up a major advantage by working with ATI/AMD on Crossfire.

NVidia are in a bit of a pickle as Intel won't license them for their upcoming chipsets.

Though the volume on the market is lower end ... and in the middle still mainly single cards.

CF / SLI represents a very small market ... bragging rights are it's most important edge.

I don't feel sorry for Nvidia ... their boss is clearly an embarrassment and a head case.

The 8800GT / 9600GT are good investments tho ... ATI don't have a card to compete ... yet.

Uhm, the 3870 trades blows with the 9600gt if memory serves. Plus they are supposed to be releasing their 4xxx series anytime.