Firstly, the R600 which made ATI behind was designed 2-3 years before AMD bought them, as said by an AMD employee.

Secondly, ATI is in a much better position than Nvidia at the moment. They may not have the performance crown, but their chips are so much smaller that they are making much more money than Nvidia (except the profit is wiped out by the CPU division). Their tech pipeline is better too: their 40nm chipstaped out earlier than Nvidia and we will see the first one on April 6th, the RV790 wjich is about 15% faster than the RV770 and will fight the GTX285. The dual RV790, if they choose to make one, would beat the GTX295. No word on 40nm from Nvidia.

Beating the competition is one thing.

Killing them is something else entirely.

If AMD is removed from the picture, either somebody else is going to enter the market for consumer desktop processors or anti-trust organizations are going to watch Intel like a hawk. Most companies in a monopoly position understand that they need to keep limited competition around to satisfy regulators. Even Microsoft invested in Apple when the company was hitting bottom.

I really don't think Intel's best interests are served by tearing out AMD's throat. Hopefully Intel knows this and they're just trying to bully AMD as a negotiating tactic.

Meh, a month ago they were all buddy-buddy about this whole thing. Now it's war.

Wonder if Intel actually feels threatened or if it just smells blood in the water.

Intel and Nvidia FTW!!!!!

without AMD, VIA will have the perfect chance to expand and with Nvidia's Ion 2 Platform supporting VIA's processor their market share will quickly expand.

Phenom II X4 955. 3.2GHz. DDR3. Mid-April. Get ready.

na.... my next processor is either a Core i5 or Core i7 or a westmere based Intel.

Noble sentiments and I have considerable sympathy with your motives. Unfortunately I make recommendations as a professional and the simple truth is that AMD makes nothing remotely comparable in performance to the high end Intel CPUs especially the Core i7. They represent a good value for those on a budget but they just can't deliver the same level of performance.

Taking Crysis as one example at 1680 x 1060, the best AMD score is 22nd from the top, below the several standard Core 2 Duo CPUs let alone Quads, Quad extremes and Core i7. It's the difference between 163 FPS and 112. For World in Conflict it is the difference between 218 FPS and 103. That's more than double the performance. That's a performance gap that is just too big to ignore and give reputable professional advice.

The situation is better in GPUs but they aren't actually part of the dispute.

yes because alot of people will notice 41fps more? man 112 fps is still awesome. If the game ran at say 30fps and then 70fps then yes that would be somehting to talk about. However they are both over 100 fps. Consideirng an Intel CPU is 2x as much as and AMD where I am, it is still more logical to get and AMD since the intel isn't giving me anything that I would notice.

Yeah, for the 1%* of computer users in your price bracket the Core i7 is the best option this year. And high-end Westmere isn't until mid-2010.

*Source: Intel