What a shame. My first (personally owned) CPU was a 1GHz AMD Thunderbird AXIA. I then went with a few Athlon XP processors before trying out an Intel Pentium 4 Northwood. I took one more step to AMD with a dual core Opteron 165 but have been using Intel ever since.Although ATI graphics business division of Advanced Micro Devices competes against rival Nvidia Corp. pretty successfully on the market of professional graphics cards, AMD seems to be completely not interested in the market of central processing units (CPUs) for workstations. According to market tracking firm Jon Peddie Research, 99.9% microprocessors for workstations in Q3 2010 were supplied by Intel Corp.
"AMD maintains a presence as a supplier to the workstation industry, plying its professional-brand FirePro GPUs, but as far as we can tell the company has thrown in the towel when it comes to selling its CPUs into the same space," said Alex Herrera, senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research.
Working hard to increase its foothold in a market dominated by rival Nvidia, AMD’s not giving up on the battle for professional graphics hardware dollars. With its recent top-to-bottom Evergreen overhaul of FirePro GPUs, the company knows it has got a competitive line and is looking to capitalize on it, according to the analyst with JPR. If it cannot necessarily overthrow Nvidia, AMD intends to hang onto the 13% market share it has, and maybe gain a few points (and some healthy margins) here or there. But the opposite appears to be the case for CPUs, where the company has now completely relinquished its hard-won market share back to Intel. AMD appears completely apathetic about the fortunes or value of entrenching Opteron or Phenom in this vibrant, performance-sensitive corner of the PC market.
"AMD hasn’t really been engaged in the workstation market for some time, sitting back to watch Opteron’s penetration in workstations drop from a peak of 3.6% of the worldwide market in Q2 2006 (and a more impressive 9.9% of dual-socket workstations) down to 0.1% in Q3 2010. And with the last major holdout HP quietly discontinuing its two Opteron models recently, AMD’s share of the CPUs shipping in workstation will for all intents and purposes drop to zero," said Mr. Herrera.
I just think they had the opportunity to shine and Intel snuck around without warning with the Core 2 series and never looked back.
Fortunately AMD acquired ATi, otherwise I think they'd be in some serious trouble right now.