http://m.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/news/exclusive-amd-hires-bank-explore-options-sources-010042239--finance.html?orig_host_hdr=news.yahoo.com&.intl=US&.lang=en-US

They've hired JP Morgan Chase? Yup, they're doomed. Damn it! Now I have to buy over process Intel motherboards and processors now. That svcks.

I don't use AMD CPUs or graphics cards, but it'd still be bad if they went out of business. Competition is a good thing.

Yeah, think how much intel cpu's and nvidia gpu's will go up in price.

I've always used their graphics cards alongside Intel's processors.

Wow. Back in 05, they put fear in Intel with their x64 CPUs. They've been getting their ass kicked by Intel since then. At least they are competitive against Nvidia though.

Yes. Just look how MS and Sony have ruined the console market. No competition so they bring out a slimmer version every year with slighlty more memory for a ridiculous price.

It saddens me that those consoles are virtually the same thing, with only a select few "exclusives" each. I quote because most of the 360's supposed "exclusives" can also be found on the PC (Which for me, personally, defeats the purpose of getting a 360), so it's just one big cluster[censored] of identical systems with identical games, and I'm sitting here going "WHY?!"

I'm glad I jumped ship to intel while I could. I could see they were quite quickly hitting a dead end.

This generation's consoles have had significant price drops as a result of those slimline models. Not to mention the reduction in heat and power consumption.

Also, although the consoles look very similar when taken at face value, we've seen Sony make drastic changes in how they handle the PlayStation brand as a result of the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live's success (think of how the PSN was at launch, compared to how it is today). You've also got Nintendo, recognizing their inability to compete directly, taking some fairly risky moves all in an effort to stand out from the crowd. "Core" gamers may not want to admit it, but both Nintendo and Microsoft are onto something with their various experiments with how we play games, because how we play has about as much potential, if not more, than the advances in game design that result from raw horsepower.

Unless you're buying the "bleeding edge" i7 processors the price/performance ratio between Intel and AMD processors is very close. Certainly not enough difference to completely ruin build plans, IMO.

Yeah, that was a really good time for consumers of CPUs. Unfortunately, I think that was a fortuitous sequence of events for AMD. They hit the jackpot with a great core design at exactly the same time Intel was making huge mistakes.

Trailing AMD in the benchmarks, Intel allowed their marketing department to make core design decisions, which was a disaster. They concluded that clockspeed was the biggest selling point to end-users, which drove Intel to push their horrible Netburst architecture for Pentium 4, which allowed for higher clockspeeds but was ridiculously inefficient clock-for-clock. This blew up in their face when even laymen consumers began to realize that Pentium 4 svcked eggs. Huge silicon win for AMD and their much more efficient designs.

Intel also made a huge gamble in the enterprise market with their Itanium platform that didn't play nice with legacy x86 binaries. This allowed AMD to step in and offer their 64-bit extensions to x86, which was really attractive to shops that wanted a less painful upgrade path (in other words, almost everybody). Huge standards win for AMD.

Unfortunately for AMD it would seem that Intel learned from their mistake, and at the end of the day they (Intel) are far better-equipped to compete in what is now a rapidly-evolving market. I really hate to see it happen, but AMD's lucky streak looks to be over...at least for now.

Yup, and i'm hearing the same thing you are about Intel's better equipped facilities. They're already prepared to go into the 16/14nm range by 2014 apparently, and the 7nm probably isn't too far away from that. It's the 7nm range that things get interesting due to quantum mechanics.

Love the Core i7 920 in my PC, but I stick with the Radeon ATI series stuff as my graphics cards. If AMD goes out of business it will definitely be a major blow for competition in the chip market. Can certainly see Intel doing severe markups in their stuff due to "necessary cost increases."