next to nothing I'm sure...and AMD is hardly hurting lately

Time and hardware? are you serious? A liquid cooled cpu block and chiller would do this off the shelf from newegg for $100 or so. Considering they were looking to break a worldwide record (read faster that Intel or anyone else) they probably used Liquid nitrogen. Which again would cost only a few $100 at most. and Pointless? Well the point is they are showing their 8 (yes eight!) core cpu is likely to sell Retail clocked somewhere in the 4-5Ghz range. Any college student would do this work for the demo for free, or just have a few employees spend the afternoon slapping it together. This also means with aftermarket coolers, and normal liquid chillers, home users could snap up an 8 core CPU running in the 5.5 to 7Ghz range for only $40-100 extra in cooling and still be on par in cost with an Intel retail chip.

Can retail AMD chips do 4Ghz? They already do! the 2-3 year old 945 Phenom/Athlon II could reliably clock between 3.8 and 4.2GHz sometimes even higher with just a $30-$40 aftermarket cooler (and just one with nice heatpipes and good fan mind you, no water cooling or liquid nitrogen needed.)

Don't forget that AMD chips did and still outperforms similarly priced Intel Chips..."bedraggled" indeed. AMD has kept up their market share gaining 1.5% while intel lost 1.5%, and actually made good improvements into the server market as well, taking more share from Intel in recent times:

From the Reg just a month ago:

I"n terms of unit shipments, AMD gained a little market share thanks to the Fusion APUs, with 20.4 per cent of total PC microprocessor shipments in the second quarter, a gain of 1.5 points of market share compared to the first quarter. Intel had a commanding 79.3 per cent share of the PC microprocessor pie, and lost that 1.5 points of share."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/02/pc_microprocessor_q2_2011/

Not to mention AMD did this all despite Intel's very illegal monopoly tactics and dirty business ethics, and a constant overlooking by the most of the press like Intel fav's Toms Hardware (though to be fair Tom's has been choosing AMD chips for their budget gaming systems quite a lot).

And you can buy a 945/955 CPU now for about $100 or less, and I bet if you have an AM3 motherboard you will be able to drop one of these nice new 5+Ghz processors without having to buy a new motherboard, let alone a whole new system. USB 3.0, oh yeah AMD Motherboards have been supporting that on most models for over a year now, so if you have a recent PC, no need to upgrade MB at all.

But go ahead and snap up that new Core i7 for $700 if you care too, you will loose respect of economical folks like myself, but hey you can have FPS bragging rights..at least till AMD's new chips come out :-) The AMD Fusion chips hold an awful lot of promise too especially for gaming laptops and budget gaming PC's Or maybe you like the integrated video Sandy bridge offers...didn't know that it had video, oh that's right its so bad even Intel isn't promoting that feature.

(Oh and yes this cheap 945 CPU with a simple BIOS change to overclock it will run Crysis with all the bells and whistles... at least if you pair it with a nice new AMD video card anyways)

Right on!

Because Intel would never stoop to such levels would they?

*cough* pentium 4 */cough*