After that decision they fell behind in performance and efficiency. I don't know if that was the root cause but it stayed in my memory as one pivotal point.
It would be interesting to read an insider story on how that decision played out in the meantime.
I think they just needed to have the next major line with enough time to try to respond to the P-M/Core switch to really knock it out of the park...and we got Bulldozer instead, where they bet big on trying to partition resources and a different notion of distinct "cores", and didn't come out ahead.
Now AMD has better GPUs while intel struggles in that area.
Yes, I almost forgot the resulting Bulldozer fiasco. I believe that was a result of applying GPU thinking to CPUs.
(It's too bad that AMD didn't wind up on top so far in the GPGPU area - if they had, all that GPU influence being a problem probably would be much easier to write off.)
Intel struggles in that area?
AFAIK the only problem Intel struggles with, GPU-wise, is that they appear to loathe the idea of making discrete GPUs, so they're constantly trying to figure out how to make a fast GPU in an acceptable on-package area.
I was under the impression that AMD's on-die GPUs, while (possibly? I haven't tested their on-die GPUs in a few generations) nicer than Intel's, were still not something to write home about.
But like others have pointed out, I believe it is a operational, internal struggle, and basically a leadership problem.
I don't know about that.
The Intel core are very good processors but the entry price for the smallest one is over $100.
I can remember some cheaper product lines from Intel but they weren't that great. AMD had decent CPU for the cheap laptops and computers. Dunno how much volume and margin there is to be done on that segment.
amd bought ati right before the release of the r600 lineup which totally lost against nvidia 88xx cards and marked nvidia for gpu domination for years to come, so they acquired a company right before their biggest product failure, and after that they released phenom 1 which was a failure in its own right, after these 2 consecutive big lost they had to go fabless because couldn't afford to keep up the pace with technology and because of low demand they were not running full time ...this brought a lot of other complications for amd, because of missed deadlines of pp and in general not competitive to intel...
after having modestly recovered from the phenom fiasco with phenom2, and with r700 gpus, it tanked again with bulldozer after lots of delays...then released a decent version with vishera which was a good enough contender to intel ivy-bridge, except for power/efficiency because they were already behind in the pp, after that to regain margin with intel an entire pp was skipped and amd stalled in the high highpower market focusing only on low power pp with apus, going for zen, thank god GCN was good enough to make them keep a sizable market in the gpus...