[chemmail]

We may see history repeat itself. Back in 2006, stock prices were really high, like in the 40s. The Opteron was getting heavy adoption in the server market. But the stocks just kept sinking. Purchasing ATI for a huge sum did not help. Intel would need to crawl out from the Pentium 4 architecture, which just did not scale well and was simply not as efficient. Of coarse this did not stop Intel from pressuring all the big PC makers by doing shady deals to have their chips featured rather than AMDs.When Nehalim came out in late 2008, Intel would retain performance crown for the whole decade, which was not so good for the consumer.

AMD finally got Jim Keller back in 2012 to help develop Zen. This would prove to give them a fighting chance. He lead development of the Infinity Fabric, successor to his Hypertransport, which would allow the Zen to be so modular in adding more and more cores so easily. He was previously head of K8 architecture which lead to the successful Athlon 64 and Opterons. We also have to thank him for transitioning us to 64bit. He later departed and working on the A4/A5 CPUs at apple in the iphone 4/4s and ipad 1/2 respectively. These chips also helped Apple dominate for nearly a decade in CPU performance. Jim and Raja Koduri made a great team at Apple at that time. Jim would head to Tesla next, and Raja would head back to AMD to help create Vega. And now Intel has the duo. Will they be able to give us another decade of dominance from Intel? Exciting times coming!

[aoeusnth1]

"Invest in Jim" might be the real winning strategy here.