Tim Smalley, editor of bit-tech in the UK, paints a bitter picture of AMD's current state of affairs reporting that, as of last week, AMD was worth less than it paid for ATI back in July of 2006.

He claims that AMD's market value has dropped to around $5b USD, which is $400m USD less than what ATI was worth when AMD made the questionable decision to buy the Canadian based company - but that is easy to say in hindsight at the struggling chip firms' defense.

Worse still for AMD, bit-tech goes on to say Intel is now 32 times as big as AMD in terms of stock market value and Nvidia is even estimated at almost 4 times larger with $19b in market capital.

It's fair to say things haven't been going well for AMD since the middle of last year, as its two major rivals launched products that remain largely uncontested even today. Neither the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 nor the GeForce 8800 GTX have been truly surpassed in terms of performance yet and it's not going to happen until next year.

There are no two ways about it: the Phenom launch was a disappointment. This was largely down to the fact that the company found an erratum in the L3 cache Translation Lookup Buffer, which could cause serious system instabilities in certain scenarios and it prevented the company from launching a 2.4GHz Phenom CPU at the eleventh. AMD issued a TLB fix to motherboard manufacturers to implement into their BIOSes and when the results for the TLB fix came out, it wasn't pretty.

It will be interesting to see if the folks at AMD can turn things around.