I've always been a fan of AMD. Most of my personal machines have been (and still are) AMD-based. I hope they manage to turn it around. I'd hate for Intel to be the only 'superpower' left.

I've used Cyrix, IBM, Intel and AMD. Given the choice I'll go for AMD every time so this is good news for me.

Gods I hope they stick around too. Intel showed what it can/would do if they don't feel like they've got any competition. Anyone remember the near disaster that was Prescott?

Plus they'd inevitably charge insane amounts of money for the crap they'd end up producing. If nothing else, AMD needs to be around to make sure the x86 market doesn't stagnate.

But yeah AMD goes into every computer that I build for myself.

Intel is way out in front with it's fastest procs, the QX9770 is probably a third faster than a phenom 9700, but it's down to the money, honey, Intel can reduce the cost of it's lower end procs because their high end is sub'ing them, AMD don't have that luxury at the moment, the best you can do at the moment is get a 5000+ black edition and (if you're lucky) clock it to 3.5Ghz which is much better bang for your buck than the same priced Intel, but it's not "officially" supported.

I'm glad I went for an AMD (3800+) a year ago 'cause now I can stick in the 5000+ be which will prolong the life of it for not much cash, if I went intel I'd be looking at a new mobo and a higher cost proc, mind you if I had money falling out of my arse I'd be Intel all the way.

Is this all AMD Barcelona's then as I have 4 of them doing 16 cores in a server, and I havent had a single issue with it.

Always been a fan of AMD and VIA processors.

Is it the British liking of the underdog?

No, I'm from the US and prefer AMD myself. Not to be taken as an insult to either party. I know the US is FAR from the world's favorite people at the moment...

Paris, because she's used to being popular, but unfavored.

Their present problems seemed to start when they bought ATI. Unlike Chipzilla they are too small to properly support 2 separate R&D departments, among other things. They should dump ATI, write it down to experience and concentrate on what they do best, cheap Intel-beating CPU's.

I recall a conversation with an AMD consultant in August 2006 that this was just 6 months away - and why would I want to look at quad core Intel when the 'real' quad core AMD CPU was just around the corner?

I'm glad it's here and I think it will be a worthy competitor to Intel's quad offering (I expect each company to win some of the benchmarks, but no company to win all of them).

However, a bird in the hand is always better and thus, although I give kudos to AMD for their chip design and for sticking with the Barcelona design, well done to Intel for getting the quad out the door before AMD.

As was written: "well done to Intel for getting the quad out the door before AMD."

Ah yes - Intel quadrature launched, but hobbled by the pathetic single FSB architecture...

Thanks, I will take my chips from AMD, with full-blown pipelines, better layout, and fewer bottlenecks.

Yeh - that large green one, with the Quadrophenia CDs in a pocket...

Given that the days of neatly separated cpus and cpus are pretty obviously numbered, AMD had little choice to acquire a graphics division, as painful as the process has been, while Intel with it's much greater resources had the luxury of building one from scratch. But now it's done, AMD are arguably in the better position strategically. Unless Intel are simply very good at playing their cards close to their chest, AMD's Fusion is much further advanced than the Intel equivalent.

in the mid-term it's actual Nvidia that I'd be concerned about.

Why?

They have just the amazing 780G chipset, that destroys anything Intel have on offer, thanks to ATI. (Check out Reg review or any other on the web). Combined with the 4850e proc, they are way ahead when it comes to cheap media systems....