I've said it before, and I'll say it again....
IBM SHOULD BUY AMD!!
IBM is the only company with the capital to rescue AMD at the moment I believe. Plus, they came up with X86 before Intel. It'd really stink if some Asian/ oriental company bought AMD. They would try to cut corners and really sink AMD's reputation, etc. I'm not sure where ATI would be after something like that happens.
amd would still lose their contract/licence on the sse and x86-64 instructions, IBM could just find a way to merge/join with amd in a more stable way, currently they partner on research into how to make faster cooler chips, slowly they should just make that link stronger.
as to sales weakness, its not just that its "mind share" people talk, and they see benches with the intel chips stomping the amd chips, even tho this dosnt mean shit for the normal user, any chip he gets today will have more power then he will ever make use of, its still perception.
this is like when i took echonolics and we had a long talk about why resessions happen, and what it comes down to is PERCEPTION, people see it on the news and in papers that we are headed into a ression and talk about it with others then prety soon they stop spending, and because most of the world is a consumer based ecoimy, this means that without people spending their $ and consuming stuff the ecoimy stalls out.
honestly, its more about psycology then anything, look how well the p4 chips sold all on the perception that intel=fast and mhz=fast, stupid people picked them up and where braggin they had a 2.6gz p4, and more times then not it really was more cpu then they needed since all the avg user does is download music and email and surf the net, but users who came into shops i worked at in those days where alwase shocked at how fast my little amd system was that only ran at 1.6gz and looked like hell(home built portable system, made from an old samsonite breifcase.....lol)
slowly many p4/intel users started to see that for their $ they got more from amd, and word of mouth spred, people started looking at reviews/benches and amd got a nice boost in market share from it, then intel FINNELY YEARS LATER got back on track with the core2 chips and dumped the p4/netburst designs.
now i still have people who REFUSE to upgrade their 3gz p4 chips because they just cant understand how a 2.x gz chip could be faster then a 3gz chip, and all the annalogy and explination in the world dosnt help them get it........(frustrating to be sure)
so even tho in reality the barc chips are still selling like hotcakes dispite the flaw(linux servers have an EASY fix for the problem that dosnt harm perf at all) people see the benches of the desktop chips being slitly slower then intels chips and assume they much suck then(dispite being ALOT cheaper for a quad)
again its all perception, really amd is picking up nicely now, and should endup doing just fine in the fairly neer future(im hoping the kuma and rana cores overclock well and are cheap