AMD can only blame itself for it's woes. When it took on Dell as a customer, lots of System builders & resellers were left with no available AMD Processors to build systems, and to boot, Dell then flooded the market with bargain basement machines that were barely better than doorstops, forcing a lot of their previously loyal re-sellers to switch heavily to intel.

I say bring on the competition from intel....

I really think it came down to the ATI merger. That put a big dent on the bottom line. I fully believe AMD will bounce back in a big way once the engineers from both combine their skills.

I think AMD decided to take a short-term hit to determine the long-term future. If AMD can somehow make a CPU/GPU all-in-one, that would be a huge bonus for system builders and thus AMD's bottom line.

A few years back AMD were the premium performance product, Intel knocked out the power hungry, cheap, slow processors.

This has reversed mostly (AMD still are good on power consumption )so it is no wonder AMD are doing badly.

They need to blow Intel away in terms of performance again.

Anyone else remember, in the early to mid 90s when GE Capital bought world + dog? I remember vividly because I had a good bit of GE stock and it suffered greatly. I think this may be a case of that. AMD buys ATi because AMD needs some new processor goodies, but it doesn't work out that way. GPU's just aren't the same beast as CPU's and the R & D doesn't cross over. Couple the expenditure of funds with the shellacking that AMD is receiving from Intel and it's enough to drive any company into the ground, even one as innovative as AMD. The beast that is Intel has righted its course and is taking absolutely no prisoners. I don't see this letting up any time soon. I think AMD just needs to hold on to it's hat, cause it ain't gonna get better any time soon.