The enthusiast market is important because it gets people talking. Let me phrase it differently: word of mouth advertising comes from the enthusiast market. When the FX processors started beating up on EE processors, FX and by association, AMD were mentioned far more frequently. The more people hear about it, the more people are likely to buy other products made by the same company. Given about a year of solid performance lead in the enthusiast market, the consumer and server markets are likely to also shift in their favor. This is what happened with the Athlon 64 line back in the 2004-2006 area. The reverse happened when everyone involved with computers started to point at how Core 2 spanked Athlon 64.

Simply put, if you are the leader of the pack for an extended period of time, it translates to better sales up and down the product lines.

Yeah, true. Enthusiast community is a great marketing tool for any manufacturer. Intel has been in the lead far too long on the CPU front and that has worked wonders for them in the enthusiast community. I was hoping PII would be change that situation in a small way at least, however once all the info leaks started about 4-6 months ago I knew AMD had nothing of consequence. I don't think anything spectacular is going to happen from AMD or Intel for that matter on the CPU front for sometime. They are both in trouble financially and R&D requires plenty of green. Hard to push out a C2Q/C2Q killer when you are barely staying afloat. Global economy is in trouble on all sides and OEM's who are the primary instigators of any major change are currently struggling and do not want to take any unnecessary financial risks.

I wouldn't be surprised to see workforce cuts from Intel pretty soon. Here is an article from Chicago Tribune from few days ago. Intel earnings drop 90% as chip sales fall

At the same time, I can actually see AMD going out of business be end of the year if the economy doesn't get any better or if their Abu Dhabi investors decide NOT to throw more money their way.

fitseries3im waiting for "Ati files for bankruptcy"

So you could pay ~$800 for the next 1337 NVIDIA card? ATI is part of AMD now. Its fate is tied to AMD.

intel has been quietly laying people off around here from what i hear, not in large numbers, but more then many would expect, ecoimy is shit, and the govt dosnt seem to be trying to fix it, corse they all have jobs they cant easly loose so they dont see the huge rush to fix their fuckups that lead to this.......

btarunrSo you could pay ~$800 for the next 1337 NVIDIA card? ATI is part of AMD now. Its fate is tied to AMD.

i think fitseries doesn't care because he as so much money that he doesn't know what a budget is.;)