ket, u need to take some buisness corses, honestly, i like ya and all but you dont understand this part of buisness, AMD NEEDED ATI, they needed their own chipsets to sell to OEM's like dell.
try and understand this, the reasion dell and the like didnt consider amd wasnt just capacity, it was also that OEM's like to buy a complete packege, chipset and cpu from the same company, it may sound silly but its fact, amd needed to buy ati to get a decent up to date chipset in house to make dell,gateway and the rest take them seirously.
sure they will hurt for it for a while, but not as long as you think, because alot of their debt was also from the new fabs they built to produce more chips(again to help get dell and the like to take them seiously).
"you have to spend money to make money" for intel thats easy they got an over abundance of $,they also have alwase had their own in house chipsets, thus they didnt need to buy another company to get back in the game(server amd chipsets dontcount they are not desktop grade/level sets).
amd wont die, and intel wont try and kill them, at this point intels back on top in the high end enthusist market, where amd was for the past few years when intel was sticking with the crappy nutburst cores *gags*
intel has more research $ but amd has alwase been better at making suprising products for their price, remmber the k5, k6, k6-2, for their price they where great values, and where steller for buisness apps compared to intel(faster), and the k6-2 was faster in games with 3dnow support, the k7 stunned everybody, i mean honestly it knocked intel for a loop and they spent years trying to recover from the k7 and k8, intel made how many diffrent sockets and chips in the 5 years!!!!!!(yes YEARS) amd used socketA?, then k8, well it only got 3-4 years, but they where good years
now that intels back on top alot of you seem to think that they are going to crush amd, and thus push this hysteria that amds dieing because they dont have the top enthusist chips anymore....
but what will the same people be saying if/when amd brings out a better chip then intel?
or a better chip then nvidia?
everybody need to chill out and realise that amd isnt in this for the short run, they alwase look 5 steps ahead even if they dont have the money that intel does honestly i think that forces them to be smarter insted of just using market share/force and bruit force to get what they want, look at the p4 days, intel kept pooring $ into researching how to get higher clocks out of the nutburst cores, finnely they realised they couldnt do it and moved over, now compare that with amd, they havent ever dont that in my exp, each of their chips tends to be an evolution on the earlyer ones, the k6 went to the k6-2 then k6-3, then amd put out the k7 and its many variants, then the k8, the k8 being VERY much like the k7 but with updated fetures like 64bit and IMC.
and the ATI side, their biggist problem in the past was their driver support, guess what, that was taken care of, and with AMD owning them its gotten even better, the smaller driver packs are down to under 10mb( i hate CCC so i use ATT)
the companys are not alike in how they do buisness or in how they manage projects, intels getter better at thinking smart, but still, how many years did it take them to adapt? to damn many if you ask me.......sure the k10 is late coming out compared to the c2d, but again, so what, i and most other smart users would rather have a product thats well designed and ready for market then something that was just rushed out to compete.
intel has rushed alot of chips to market(pres-hott anybody?)
in my exp amd hasnt dont that, they have been pushing the clocks on current gen chips to ring the last little bit out of them that they can, but thats to be expected, and when k10 comes out, well i fully expect it to at the very least compete 1:1 with intel clock for clock, then intel will put out something, amd will put out a new steping, intel will put out a new chipset and core(oh boy another forced mobo upgrade), amd will put out a new steping/core, so on and so forth.
the only diffrance i invision being that things will stay closer then they where with p4, and that with amd you wont be doing so many forced board upgrades