Just saw AMD has a hardware rep on overclock.net, nice to see there starting to identify themselves.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1297192/guild-wars-2-crossfire-7970#post_17992147

Heh, there's apt to be at least ONE AMD rep out of dozens or even hundreds on the forums who had a change of heart, letting the higher humanitarian qualities lead the way rather than the covert AMD-Edelman shilling policies. It was probably Mark Poppin here who led that AMD rep to a change of heart, to identifying himself for the sake of forum integrity.

I think, if AMD are going to concentrate on APU, then they need better than a 76xx glued to their CPU...Lets face it, they aren't going to compete with Intel, HTPC is the perfect fit for an APU, but most are connected to HDTVs!....13x7 gaming is not going to cut it @ 1080.....They need to bolt a 77xx or perhaps a 78xx onto it..I would love a low watt HDTV build, to streaming my film collection or even play casual games on, while the wife commandeers the office PC...

The [Trinity] chips aren't bad—the integrated graphics processor on some of the chips are capable of beating Intel's HD 4000 GPU in gaming performance, though the CPUs aren't quite capable of beating last year's Sandy Bridge processors at similar clock speeds. For AMD, the issue is that they're still talking mostly about desktop and laptop chips.
. . .

There's one thing in the Haswell presentation that is conspicuously absent from AMD's latest Steamroller architecture update: tablets. With Haswell, Intel is pushing the power consumption of its flagship x86 CPUs lower than ever before with a 10W processor aimed at Ultrabooks and tablets. Going even lower on the power consumption scale, its upcoming Clover Trail Atoms (and, going beyond that, next year's Bay Trail chips) are going to end up in lower-cost tablets and even smartphones. . . .

AMD has produced a lower-power processor based on the the Bobcat architecture found in AMD-based netbooks and budget laptops . . . but Atom tablets have so far been much more numerous and it still leaves the company without a higher-performing Haswell competitor or a more power-efficient version for use in smartphones.

What's even more worrisome is that their relevance to anything but low-cost PCs is also melting away bit by bit. This has been happening slowly but steadily since 2006: First, Intel's Core 2 processors beat AMD's then-current Athlon X2 processors in clock-for-clock performance, but an aggressive price war kept AMD competitive in the mainstream market.

As quad-core processors became more common, it later became the case that a cheaper quad-core processor from AMD could beat a dual-core processor from Intel in heavily-threaded workloads, but AMD's dual-core processors were confined to the low end of the market, and the introduction of Turbo Boost, Hyperthreading, and ever-better performance-per-watt eventually helped Intel overcome this in the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge epoch.

Finally, AMD had its integrated graphics performance to fall back on. Its argument in recent years has been that its chips offer more "balanced" performance than Intel's—a "good enough" CPU paired with an integrated graphics part that could replace low-end previous-generation dedicated graphics chips. This argument is still largely true in AMD's current Trinity products, but even this argument is slowly losing its potency as Intel's integrated graphics solutions catch up by leaps and bounds; even two years ago, Intel's graphics were basically unusable for gaming, but current chips provide a reasonable level of performance for older games or newer titles with settings turned down.

The trouble with AMD is that it doesn't have big plans to chase new growth markets like tablets and smartphones, and it's running out of niches to occupy in its traditional desktop and laptop PC markets. The PC market needs AMD (or a company like it) to keep Intel on its toes and to keep prices down, but the company's fumbles and inability to execute have made it hard to have a lot of faith in it. In both the PC and server markets, AMD offers a decent alternative to Intel for the price-conscious, but it looks increasingly unlikely that they'll ever again be anything else.