They need a way to convince the average consumer that their product is just as good or better than Nvidia. When they had better products (HD5000 vs GTX 400), people still flocked to Nvidia even though, ironically, the 400 series has all the problems AMD has had recently. They can't have that this time. Beyond cleaning house in the GPU department, I would also clean us in the PR/marketing because they aren't that good. Poach some from Nvidia as they can convince people that corn kernels in a turd are really gold nuggets.
That's quite misleading. The 5000 series from AMD sold INCREDIBLY well, and it was the closest AMD ever came to achieving majority market share VS nvidia. AMD's driver support, however, was BEYOND abysmal, which is the only reason the 400s sold at all outside of the surprisingly competitive 460/465. This was absolutely the time you kept multiple different catalyst drivers on tap depending on what game you wanted to play, because every fix brought 3 new bugs in different titles, and known issues took months if not years to fix.
They then lost that market because AMD, deciding the 5000's were great, immediately pulled a rebrandeon and rehashed the ENTIRE lineup. Nvidia struck back with the 500s at the time and caught AMD completely off guard, they had assumed Fermi was beyond repair. They rushed production and final release of the 6900s, which were not enough to close the gap and nvidia managed to, somehow, reclaim the performance crown with the hot, power hungry fermi chips, while AMD let their smaller more efficient chips rot on the vine. After ONE GENERATION.
AMD absolutely deserves the position they are in. They dug this hole over the course of a decade. The current incompetence of RTG, getting beaten by mid range nvidia cards, is the logical conclusion of a GPU maker that simply is incapable of consistently churning out decent products and supporting them properly. Ditching the head of marketing, losing Raja, and other high profile losses are great for AMD, the old baggage was just as bad as Hector Ruiz, Dirk Meyer, and Rory Read, the unholy trinity of C suites that just about killed AMD by letting go of the mobile line instead of licensing to qualcomm, green lighting bulldozer, and wasting hundreds of million on things like SeaMicro.
