Future Prospects

The new K10 processor architecture is coming, but clearly not soon enough but if you think Intel is going to just sit on its hands while that is released, you are kidding yourself! Also K10 is going to come out with your typical new product price premium, use a new socket, and cost a bucket load to upgrade to. If 939 users are not willing to upgrade to the currently superior Intel Core 2 platform, why would they upgrade to K10 when it is going to cost even more again? Let's just hope it offers some tangible performance increases.

Then we have the R600 (at least we think we do...), if the ATI portion of AMD kicks off again, this could help with a much needed cash injection letting it refocus on CPUs and chipsets (their core business), and hopefully the company could become one big happy family again. The problem is that, say the ATI portion does kick off and AMD can start spending money on the CPU development side of things again, what is going to happen to the graphics card portion of the business? Were their eyes bigger than their stomach when they decided to buy out ATI?

If AMD channels all the money generated from the VGA card business into CPU design, how can you expect that portion to become successful? Can the R600 really bring in the money to support all those divisions; motherboards, VGA, and processors. I highly doubt it, though anything is possible but it seems evident AMD is going to need some type of help in the near future if they intend to remain in existence.