Well they are alive.......with their huge losses though you can hardly call them "well"
acctualy if you look at it from an asian/japnese point of view amd is alive and well, because unlike americans the japanese dont worrie so much about the short term but they plan things out 10-15-20 years in the future, to them buisness litterly is war, and they plan to win even if it takes more then one lifetime.
now i know amd isnt japanese BUT its about how you look at it, amd is still taking a hit from buying ATI, and ati stock/image in the market are still taking a hit from the same thing, the out lay for ATI was large BUT it did bring some things amd needed in house, they now have their own chipsets and gfx solutions once again, the first time since the old irongate days(first socketA boards=amd irongate chipset) I dont care what anybody says in this case, yes it was a huge out lay BUT it was a smart LONG TERM move, because it got them ALOT more OEM contracts.
see this is how OEM's tend to think, they would rather get all their componanats for a system from the same maker, Now this dosnt mean amd needs to make motherboards, but they need to make chipsets so that Acer/Gateway can order their boards from say ECS/Biostar/Asus/exct with amd chipsets for amd chips, just like 99% of the common intel market is intel chipsets with intel chips, AMD hasnt had that because they wisely droped their own chipsets back in the socketA days for all but servers, i say wise because SiS735+ chisets and nforce1-2 chipsets back then where FAR better then anything amd could bring out, and it would have been a HUGE waist of resorces to have developed a new desktop chipset, those resorces where better spent improving the athlon/athlon xp cores and designing the athlon64 cores, and i think everybody can agree that price/perf the ONLY thing the p4/p-d had going for them was encoding when compared to amd back then, and you needed good ram and high clocks for the p4/pd to shine at that even.
basickly, dont count amd out, they have been around for many many years, and will be around many many more, its just a matter of whos on top for now, we could see another big win for amd with the next core update of the k10, or when intel finnely moves to IMC we could see a design flaw that causes perf to suck or stab problems like some of the rushed out p4 chips had, nobody expected intel to put out a chip that sucked as bad as the p4 after they had JUST put out the p3 coppermine/tulitin chips that where honestly on par with the amd chips of the day, intel mis-caculated there, and amd captilized on it, just as amd mis-caculated about the core2 chips and had no responce at the time, at least in this case amd has kept price for stock perf equivlant to intel, and thats where most of the market lyes.
as to people saying that the k10's arent helping amd because of that tbl bug(or whatever its called) i would have to say thats BS, sales of the barc and agea chips are still quite high in the server and prof markets, specly where linux/unix based os's are concerned because guess what, the patch to fix the bug can just be compiled into the kernal with zero negitive perf impact.
and anyway i havent seen anybody able to re-produce the bugg on a home system , and they have been trying, seems that it only happens is very rare occations, even on unpatched windows systems!!!!!
sure it dosnt overclocka s well as intel, but its a cheap powerfull quadcore, that in some cases acctualy out performes the equivlant intel chips (server tasks, check google for the review im refering to)
personaly, i think if amd gets the 45nm chips out to market soon we will see a nice turn around in the enthusist market, maby not the huge market share boost some would like but it could even things out a bit and get amd back some of that mind share c2d stole away
btw, theres a reasion i havent gone c2d, no need, my x2@35% overclock is more then enought power for the games i play, and really for what i spent on this system no intel system would come close.
board=43bucks
cpu=40bucks
ram=140 shiped for 4gb d9's
plays all current games just as well as my buddys quad core that cpu along cost him more then my cpu/board/ram/psu/burners combine!!!!!
