Of course the Radeon division produces money.
Its nice idea, probably true, but I'd like to see that. As of now they need HBM and double the bus width to compete with nvidia, and in general significantly higher number of transistors (see 960 vs 380, 3B vs 5B)
The x86 license IS transferable
What you say is correct, probably it will be renewed due to a stalemate. However I still question the viability of investing in x86 as a technology for Qualcomm or Apple, given that ARM can probably provide the same level of performance, if one will make a full blown desktop CPU. And at least for Apple backward compatibility is not an issue, linux/unix systems are running happily on ARM since ages. Obviously users will need to download a new build from the App Store, but it shouldn't be that hard. Microsoft on the other hand is quite dependent for now and they might invest in it just to keep their windows business up. Who knows ... we will see. My concern is that if someone wants to get into this business, they could just go to Via and buy the license, and then invest like 1B in AMD to get the extension and that's it they don't need to pay 5B on a dying AMD.
AMD, with its universally acknowledged limited resources, has been in business for 45 years,
Things have never been so bad for AMD. In the past, yes they were the underdog, had limited resources, but there was ton of good will, their products were competitive from price/performance perspective, whole market was growing like crazy. Not to mention that they were not so limited. They had a FAB, they were a real CPU manufacturer. And the example about opteron that you gave confirms what I said. At the time they had good product, strong perspective, profitability, obviously companies wanted to do business with them.
So who's perceptions are you talking about, exactly?
General perception. See reviews, see forums, not necessarily mine.
In fact I'm a big AMD fan and the Haswell that i now have is the first Intel CPU I have in my desktop since 98 when i bought my first x86 computer (had Z80 before).
Even this one I wouldn't have as despite the bad press, I initially bought the FX 8300, in very good price, overclocked it to 8350 levels and returned it the next day, due to low performance.
Single thread was abysmal, lower than my old phenom 2, FPU abysmal, lower than my 4 years old phenom 2. Multi-thread performance was great, but I couldn't accept that some tasks will work poorly on the new CPU. Intel gave me a good 40% flat performance increase both in single and multi-thread.
On the GPU side, I still went AMD, again against popular opinion, which was placing competing nvidia product with better time-frames, better power consumption and so on.
I did it partly to support them, partly because I couldn't understand how nv can work so well with the small bus, I was sure there is a trade off somewhere which nobody saw so far. And guess what, I'm a bit disappointed with this as well. I did not return it this time, as I got my 30% increase in all applications but ... I have a problem with the VRMs which most of the time go to 90 - 100 degrees C in gaming, 125+throtling in furmark. I contacted Asus and they told me its perfectly fine ... don't worry, just don't use furmark for long periods. This is not necessarily AMD fault, but a poor design on Asus side. VRMs should have touched a heat pipe from the big cooler. From another perspective this is a side effect of the fact that AMD GPUs consume a lot of power.
