Sad...

Intel monopoly definitely won't be very fun

I think AMD will stay afloat. The 48*0's are phenomenal, and if they can push a 45nm shrink fast enough they may catch up with big ol' Intel in good time.

I don't see them leading Intel until a few years, but they will survive.

Sad indeed. I have owned mostly AMD processors and have enjoyed them very much. I hope that AMD can make a come back as it would be boring and probably more expensive with just Intell to deal with. I know I will get flack for saying this this but I a certain that Intell was not playing fair prior to the release of its core2 processor. Now they do have the better product but prior to core2 they used some muscle to keep themselves on top ie the antitrust case.

^^I second that.

There is a very strict timeline set by shareholders for Intel to release and engineer their processors and top heads at Intel would easily be fired if they strayed from it. Also Intel wouldn't be able to sell any processors if they keep very similar performing processors year after because there would be no need for people to buy they same exact computer. So don't give me any bs that no AMD would ruin to future computer market because Intel wouldn't be around if they stopped increasing their cpus performance and go down the drains themselves. Also AMD's timeline sucks cause its not like Intels at all, AMD's shareholders need to be pressuring tops heads at AMD like Intel's shareholders do.

From year ago, much of base product is gone with little replacement public wants. dual processors just didn't have numbers to justify beyond X2. Keeping Up with Nvidia is like bucking bronco.

Its strong company that engineering has lead to slow spot, Vista may Be That Slow Spot. Barcelona Was Night Mare. Leaving open spot.

Knocking Buck out of competitors pockets is Great Thing. MEDIA IS RISING.People LIKE AMD More Today Than EVER.

SignedHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D.

I've been buying mostly Intel products lately, though I'm considering building myself AMD systems and recommending them to people I build systems for. Now that AMD is finally somewhat competitive, I can justify it. And if that's what it takes to keep AMD afloat, I'm certainly willing. I love my Intel but I won't deal with a monopoly.

Yay! Fanboi, competition is good to be precise, like what happen to Nvidia recently even though they have this latest and the fastest product but because of AMD/ATI competitive pricing/performance they have to reduce prices like an axe slashing at large chunk in just few weeks from launching.

I dop hope AMD introduces great processor this year that would keep it close with Intel... I used Athlon Processors in the Office way back 2003... They were better than Intel then

thg's fanboyism reveals itself in the last sentence..

"An Intel-only world would be boring and certainly not offer the excitement we have seen in the past two years."

..means to say that thg wasn't really excited when AMD brought Intel "to its knees" in 2005 and when AMD introduced the K8 architecture that pushed Intel to improve.

Is thg becoming the faux news network of technology?

I believe AMD was faster in the pre-core2 time. But what I observed was that, though faster, they got intermittent crashes. I don't know if it was with the mobo or cpu. Intel is much stable. If AMD has to compete, their cpu's/platform should be stable too. And I like AMD for their price offerings..but what matters more to me is performance and performance/watt, which Intel obviously leads at present.

As a self-confessed AMD fanboy, I will not support ntel monopoly tactics and marketing lies and unethical practices. I simply won't buy that kind of low-life crap.

You ntel fanboys -
- support a regime based on "screw you".
And the bottom line is - you know it. You don't care. You say ok to that and move the world in that direction - which hurts everyone.

Thg apparently supports it too. I look to anandtech and others for good reviews - and factual reporting - rather than lame bias and illiteracy and bogus hype and inflammatory articles. This place has about nothing to do with what I remember as the original brilliant tom's hardware guide -circa 1997. It's been sukkin for a long time.

I am waiting for AMD to make the right parts for my needs re my next pc. I don't even know what ntel has for too much money - it will always be too much money. The real cost is even higher.

AMD, I need a pc, and I will wait while you create it. No rush. Thanx for the vidcards. Next.

yeh this article is labelled 'opinion'
full of subjective inuendo and rumour
guessing wassup while listening in on a cc - which is revealed 3/4 of the way down the page - factual my butt

thx for slop

You should put that on your resume for your new job,...... court jester.

As a self-confessed AMD fanboy, your opinion automatically holds no gravity whatsoever. The ONLY intelligent approach is to support competition and choose the best product that matches your needs. Those of you who have so little sense of self that you need to use a product to define your identity are pathetic.

Pretty soon it'll go like this:

Person 1: So, tell me about yourself.
Person 2: Well, I wear Armani, Gap, and Hollister. I drink Starbucks, and I'm a type AMD personality. Sometimes I feel ATI, but my heart is leaning toward Gucci. I'm Chevy on the outside, but BMW on the inside. My horoscope says I'm most compatible with Abercrombie & Fitch people.

OMG ily bby! ttyl, lol bff.

Person 1: .....

You're taking things out of context. "An Intel-only world would be boring and certainly not offer the excitement we have seen in the past two years." means that without AMD pushing, we wouldn't have seen Intel advance its tech as it has. That's not fayboyism, that's logic.

And it referenced the last 2 years, 2005 was 3 years ago, and thus not applicable.

Buy the best product you can afford regardless of who made it. Don't reward the company with badly engineered products. Make them work for it. AMD graphics division got its act together with RV770 and I bought one after a long stroll down the greener side of the path.

Even if a whole legion of fanbois turn their back on AMD, it probably will be nothing more than a tiny blip on the radar. Unless of course the fanbois have hundreds of millions of dollar at their disposal. Enthusiasts are but a tiny slice of the market (and fanbois are even smaller), and most computer shoppers don't care what is under the hood of their computer. Anyhow, AMD won't just go under and disappear from the market. It'll probably be chopped up and bought by different investment firms before that. Or if they really go under, someone will buy their design and build more. Please stop using it as a sad excuse to excercise one's fanboyism. I don't really care what other people buy or rave about, as it is none of my business. It is just really sad when one has to justify their blind devotion and purchase with an excuse.

PS. How about rooting for the real underdog? Go VIA

Little late to the conversation... most already got said...

Go VIA!!!

go buy some ATI and AMD products!

I think it was the slower single core CPU, limited memory and unrefined windows that caused most of the crashes. My C2D WinXP crashes less than my old Athlon XP-m but so is my sister's X2 Vista.

Those 45nm processors don't look too shockingly power saving..

And for 2.1 ghz? It better have alot of cycles in a clock,because hot damn,my pentium D took less power.

@dragunover

I haven't checked the power usage lately myself and don't recall values but you don't always get power savings when going to smaller process... when moving to smaller processes, if the transistor count stays the same, then yes, you'll get savings, but as always, they add transistors to increase the performance of the chips, more transistors means more power. Big thing with AMD's 45nm processors is a large jump in cache... they're adding that to almost mirror Intel's philosophy of dumping huge amounts of cache on a chip to increase its performance. I hope it works.

Sad?? Hector Ruiz is a complete idiot! His close association with George W Bush pretty much caps the lack of brain power, stupid people tend to hang out with other stupid people.

What is really sad, is the Fab will now be another company run by once again Hector Ruiz. Say what??? Makes no sense unless they have some Mexico connection for super cheap labor on the Fab factories or plan to put a lot of illegal immigrants to work?? Either way, this is good because...???

There is absolutely NO data to prove AMD is more or less a stable processor than Intel. Myth and urban legend at work.

It's sad to see AMD in this situation, but Hector lead them down this road with one bad decision after another. He had NO vision because he couldn't really understand the connection between the companies technology and what consumers want. That happens when one does not understand the necessary details of the technology that IS AMD.

Meyer at least has the technical understanding to know a good direction from a bad direction (i.e. what will pay off and what will not pay off).

What gave AMD big financial gains was the simple fact they "had the fastest processor". This WILL always be the case, this should be the goal, big profits are made when you have the fastest processor, that's where the margin is. This has not changed and will never change. Nobody gives a rats ass if you produce the most heat efficent, the lowest power consumption, consumers want speed. Zoom Zoom. Get the zoom zoom first, then worry about heat/power later.

Nobody builds a process for a market knowing they can only get a very small profit. It's the king of the hill where the money is at.

AMD didn't actually NEED to beat Intel, they really just needed to keep it close, very close, but they failed, they lost focus, and they didn't understand the importance of smaller Fabs and being able to transition to those Fabs quickly. And now Hector Ruiz is going to head up the Fabs, oh joy -- give the heart of the company to Hector and leave the brains with Meyer?? Guess what, the brain don't work when the heart stops beating.

Hector needs to be run out of town, maybe he can find a job at one of George W Bush's oil companies. Oil is more Hector's "thing" -- simple and easy to understand.

More power=more heat...I'll wait until the benchmarks come out,unless they magically run better than atleast a Q6600,or are half the price.
Also,I worry more about being able to run my graphics card,and that means if my low power PSU can't provide,then I won't be buying a power hungry processor.

ATI is doing good and I have to problem buying those products
on the AMD side I have lackluster Quad-Core and marginally inflated prices and obsolete dual-core performance.

I would not have a problem buying AMD products if they can keep future promises (AM2 boards are not compatible with newer Phenoms), right now as an upgrade platform (I buy budget and Upgrade Slowly) I have no use for them though a bargin brand there is still some life.

I really hope for a return of AMD because competition is essential for consumer gain.

In the future I hope AMD sees the advantage of having Plan-B.

How does splitting the company in half fix ANY of the current problems? It simply is a way for AMD to raise more cash and/or restructure debt. It doesn't speed up the process technology development cycle. It doesn't make Dresden run at higher margins. It doesn't speed up new product design cycles. It doesn't make K10 clocks any faster or increase the ASP's.

But it does introduce new complexities and potentially new issues. You now have 2 separate companies trying to coordinate design with manufacturing. You have a foundry which has to design a process with other customers in mind and cannot simply tune it to individual products. You have potentially higher operational costs in the foundry with new customers, higher product mixes, more masks, reduced cycle times.

I simply see this as a way to infuse more money or a way for AMD 'design' to dump off debt onto the foundry... the problem is AMD design is forced into owning a majority of the foundry and therefor will continue to feel the impact of the debt and any operational losses in the foundry.

Just look at Spansion - Is that healthy now that it has been spun off and is more 'focused'? The difference here is AMD won't be able to simply dump their shares and write off another loss (like they did with Spansion) thanks to the x86 license terms.

Err, how can Anandtech and Toms Hardware interpret these things so absolutely differently?

Toms even suggests the CEO left of his own will, whereas Anandtech says he was fired for being bad at his job.

OMGWTFLOLBBQ?!?

http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=470

Yeah go ahead and blindly line the pockets and golden parachutes of AMD executives who can't manage their way out of a paper sack.

Fanboys of CPU makers? hahaha, I heard of Football fanboys, but not this, i buy the better product, if it's AMD or Intel, IMO, AMD is doing good lately, just see the 4870, the CPU's gonna be better soon, but it's got to take time...
i, my self, seeing that i buy a AMD system in 2010 or sometime, predicting.

Perhaps AMD is going to try and fab other companies products, not sure what VIA does currently but if theyre planning to expand who knows maybe they look AMD's way. I know most places outsource to asia for their fabs but who knows, theres gotta be a master plan in this, i dont otherwise see the point in splitting the company!

If the fabs are running idle (which is expensive for a company that isnt making profit!), perhaps this is why they are splitting. In that case it makes perfect sense, assuming there is market interest in their fabs.

I thinl Qualcomm should buy AMD. Intel Wimax have infringe qualcomm communication related patent.