I would want Intel to take over the x86 market ... At this point I'd have to agree with ex-AMD engineer, Cliff Maier who's currently working with Apple with his statement of "AMD sucks". AMD has no chance of actually competing in the market if they don't get rid of their awful management and apathetic engineering team. AMD only knows how to keep floundering left and right each time they release a new product. Let Intel have the x86 market completely as I couldn't care less about AMD's processors anymore. In fact I think it would be a good thing that Intel gets all of it's revenue on that market as we can potentially see better processors at a sooner pace. I'm all for it.

(This sounded very fanboy-ish but people have to ask themselves if AMD is really competing ?)

But aren't phones going to be going 64 bit too?

ARM is going to 64 bit to be more powerful, and x86 is getting more efficient. Somewhere they will meet in the middle.

They need to because their CPU core lacks actually compared with Intel.

Before the Phenom days actually.
Once the Core 2 processors landed, AMD essentially became irrellevant in terms of the best possible performance in the PC space, AMD sat on their K8 architecture for far to long, then the delays in the Phenom 1 combined with the TLB bug, then the delays with the Phenom 2 didn't help things.

Where AMD *really* pulled ahead was with the Athlon 2 x4 lines, more often than not you could unlock the L3 cache and get full Phenom 2 performance AND they introduced the first quad-core under $99, which was fantastic for budget machines.

However with that said, IPC of the Phenom and Phenom 2's were still inferior to the Core 2 processors, but they made up for that with overclocking, boosting the NB Clock to 3ghz would yield a user roughly 10-15% increase in IPC and most chips would hit 4ghz with 1.45v.
The FX however is worse than both in terms of IPC.

I wouldn't go that far, if it wasn't for AMD we would probably still be using a variation of the Netburst architecture with Intel still chasing the 10ghz barrier. :P
Then again, if AMD was actually even remotely competitive it wouldn't have taken Intel 3-4 years for an actual viable upgrade to my Core i7 3930K. *Still waiting/first world problems*

I would like for AMD to chase the performance crown again, AMD has done more good than harm when it was *actually* competitive.

Intel has already proven with Medfield that x86 can scale down to the same power requirements as ARM, with better performance thanks to intels fabrication prowess.
And with binary translation... Can also run ARM based apps too.
However outside of a few select tablets/phones like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1, Intel has had little success.

As for 64bit specifically, it's not really needed, sure Phones are not far away from pushing past the 4Gb of Ram barrier, but 32bit can extend pass that limit, the extra transisters spent on 64bit could have been spent on better cores.
Where the real advantage of having 64bit ARM cores is mostly in the server space, which is a *massive* and lucrative market, one that Intel will try to continue to control by throwing it's latest Atom cores at.


I can't wait for AMD to finally ditch the slow and power hungry FX based processors, Intel's quad-cores are faster than AMD's Octo-cores.

Think again. Yes, AMD is currently almost always one or more steps behind Intel, but it doesn't stand still, and should Intel slow down, AMD would reach it, so even staying behind, AMD actually forces Intel to evolve fast to keep its lead. Without this even strongly asymmetrical competition, Intel could keep on selling overpriced crap like it did before AMD gathered all the engineers it could from other Intel competitors gone bankrupt and in a few years made great leaps from k5 to k6, k6-II, k6-III and finally its masterpiece, Athlon.
BTW Athlon would have deserved the leadership on desktops from 1999 to 2006, without PC producers and specialised journalists undeservedly favouring Intel in that period, AMD would be in a better shape and the race far more balanced.
Also, I wouldn't credit Intel too much for innovation, its fast growth started when with MS they managed to put their moles at HP, SGI, Compaq-DEC to kill the best selling Unix versions and RISC CPUs to clear the way to Win NT and Itanium. Despite the elimination of Alpha, the most powerful CPU of its times, Itanium eventually failed, as even Itanium 2 struggled to tie with older and cheaper Alpha CPUs, and Intel was forced to return to x86 derivatives also for high-end servers and workstations and cluster nodes, with the Xeon, but it managed to put its grubby paws on the unused newer DEC Alpha projects, buying them for far less than their true value (they had in their drawers, at various stages of development, the projects for several never released next generations of Alpha). We don't know how much of that know-how could be easily reused on CISC CPUs, but it's not casual that very few years after Intel development started an impressive acceleration.

I would go that far because since when have AMD actually delivered in the past 8 years ? 

Your right about AMD's 3 entire good years being good thing for the industry but Intel won't ever screw up again like that. AMD have done nothing but humiliate themselves like no one's business for the past 8 years. The team that made the Athlon 64's and the first opteron's are all gone and have moved on to greener pastures like Apple.

I think AMD is finished for the most part. No one believes in AMD anymore. The market and their business clients just don't see any future in AMD. 

I find it sad that they have to sell their chips at a loss ...

"Intel should slow down" ? LOL That was a funny joke. AMD isn't forcing anyone anything but Intel keeping it's lead is mostly due to the fact that they WANT to make a good product. I'll admit that Intel screwed up but this time they'll never screw up again like they did with the pentium 4 and itanium. 

There's literally no future for AMD in the next 10 years. They've been losing money and market share constantly. 

64-bit doesn't refer to a design's power. It only refers to the length of data the chip processes. A single ARM core is still very weak compared to a single Intel core.

x86 is not getting more efficient, it's just that Intel's process lead is getting bigger.

Why does this feel like it's going to be an architecture designed for tablets and smart phones first, PC second?

I don't think AMD are designing chips to compete with Intel in terms of power any more. They've pretty much given up on that market considering the huge advantage Intel has in fabrication capability.

You're looking at it wrong. Of course AMD will never be the company that made the 2005 Opteron/Athlon 64 ever again. They've reduced in size massively since those days.

But can they maintain a competitive desktop presence, a healthy R&D pipeline, and break even on mobile and some small custom projects like consoles? Absolutely. This is a great step towards sustaining that.