Bulldozer will be the last enthusiast architecture from AMD from the looks of things. They already announced that they are moving away from that market to focus on mobile/low end. The last revision of the architecture is planned for 2015 and after that I don't see them developing a new architecture for high end. Their next architecture will be 100% focused on low power if they last that long.

I am not sure where you got 300w from tho the high end AMD FX-8350 has a TDP of 125W. Tho Intel do still crush them in that regard.

That came out a little off buthere is what i meant. Total system consumption for overclocked AMD machine without GPU is more than Intel total consumption plus any gpu at light load...

Yea Bulldozer is a shit show in terms of performance per watt, sadly AMD seem to be stuck with it for a long time.

And Haswell will probably kill AMD in the low end market as well. Especially as it will bring Intels GPUs in line with AMD's APUs.

When it comes to Intel and GPUs...ill believe it when i see it. :)

True lol, but they are promising at least double performance and DX11.1/OGL 4.0 support. Then again they couldn't even meet all the DX11 requirements with HD4000 despite listing DX11 support. And their drivers will likely still suck major balls. Still Intel don't need to beat AMD in GPU performance, just be competitive in that regard.

I wonder if cisco would be interested to buy a company like AMD. They could revamp AMD to get their own CPUs for their UCS lines... The video cards tech could be also helpfull for their HD telepresence...

I hope they dont die! I love ATI cards. They are very competitive with Nvidia cards and generally are better priced. I will be very sad to see them go as they have always been my favorite of all the companies. However lately Even I cant justify an AMD CPU over an Intel one. Video cards though is a totally different thing.

I do very easily see them ceding the Enthusiast market to intel yet still maintaining their ATI brand as well as focusing on the lower end segments with their APUs. Thats where most of the money seems to be anyways.

AMD said long ago that they were leaving the high-end market business and would focus on the other portions of the market. And that's what they are doing.

I agree that AMD's best CPUs can't compete with Intel ones, but you can see that AMD has been pricing its chips very well, pairing them with Intel chips that have similar performance.

And there is another thing. If AMD disappears, what will happen with Intel? With AMD out of the game and with VIA being the only other x86 licensee, Intel could be seen as it is monopolizing the market. If that happens they could be forced to give more licensees (to Nvidia or ARM for example) and/or being forced to split.

Intel, as much as we, need AMD alive.

Since the 90s AMD has primarily sold because of value not performance ...

The top of the line AMD processors (from what I can tell) are generally priced along side the mid-line Core i5 processors, with the bulk of the high end AMD processors being roughly equal in price to a Core i3 processor. On top of that there are usually better savings on packaged CPU, Motherboards and memory on the AMD side of things than the Intel side.

The net result of this is that you can build a fairly high end gaming rig for $750 using AMD; CPU+Motherboard+Memory for $350, $125 hard drive, $200 graphics card, $50 case, $25 DVD drive.

AMD has beaten Intel a few times in raw performance (When Pentium III came out for example) but in general you are correct. What kept AMD popular is the gaming performance. They usually were 95% as good as Intel for 60-70% of the price. This changed with the FX series chips. The gaming performace is lagging at any price point...but the overall stuff is hit an miss. 

I built an FX rig few months ago, just for the sake of seeing what all the fuss is about. And it's not a bad platform for pertty much anything you throw at it. However it isn't for enthusiasts. It gets hot, overclocking is limited and that top end performance just isn't there.