What I get out of it, is AMD sees more opportunity in the mobile space, but will still do X86. But for how long tho? And ARM wants in the desktop space. So maybe AMD will slowly bow out of X86 and leave it to Intel and ARM for the desktop market(assuming ARM can get their perofrmance way up, currently its too slow to compete with the big Intel i5/i7). AMD Bulldozer(which I considered for about a week, before building a new i7 system), is just too quirky, with its low performance on games, and Ive read its performance driving multi-gpu is poor. So for now Intel still rules the roost, in X86 performance. Which is sad, AMD hyped Bulldozer as an i7 competitor, which it can match the i7 2500, but barely. But, Intel can't afford to be branded a monopoly, so they need either AMD or ARM in the desktop space, if only to stave off the evil word monopoly.
I read an interesting article regarding the Bulldozer line. AMD aimed this at the server processor market, but when compared to Intel's Xeon line, they can't compete price on the to performance ratio. The chip is too slow compared to a similarly spec'd out Intel system, even though the Intel costs a couple of hundred dollars more. Remember in the server market, is couple of hundred dollars is nothing when a server costs $1.8 million with it's 160 TB of disks and 80TB of RAM. So with the Bulldozer, you get a fast system, but it's not as fast as the Xeon-based one, and it's only slightly less expensive. The 2% difference as it works out to be isn't worth it in the price to performance category.
On the desktop side, the processor will never make it because it will be too slow due to the way it's structured. It was built for the server market, and the instructions are different. The Xeon processors, for example, are built to handle large, fast transactions which are found in database servers. This is different than the types of instructions that are thrown about on a desktop, so the processor works a lot less efficiently on the desktop.
I feel bad for AMD. They tried to get this right, and I think the Bulldozer was a big disappointment for them as a company, and has forced them to pull back. Perhaps they will focus on their video chip market, and make ATI a far better competitor to NVidia.
By the mobile market, they probably mean tablets and such, which require low power and can compete nicely with Intel if they can get this right.
To be honest, I was never a big fan of AMD. I was burned by them years ago with their knock off on the 486s and Pentiums. This shows how long ago I used them. Their chips was more than slower than the Intel equivalent, and did not have the power, and temperature throttling built in that Intel had and still has today.
In the old AMD processors, including the K-series, they could easily cook if they overheated. This is unlike the Intel processors, which at first will slow down, then eventually shutdown. The problem with AMD is they relied on the motherboard manufacturers to do this instead of building this into the chip. With is approach, many systems actually overheated and the processor burned through the motherboard. There was a video on Tom's Hardware at one time showing an AMD cook as it's temperature got up to over 400C when it's heat sink fell off.
John
