Comment Re:So AMD wants to doom themselves to...mediocrity (Score 1) 87
To quote AMD (pdf) in their 2014 Q1 earnings, a couple days ago:
We are on track to generate approximately 50% of our revenue from high-growth markets, including embedded, semi-custom, dense server, professional graphics, and Ultra Low-Power client, where we can create differentiated winning solutions by the end of 2015. (...) We used to be a business centered over one stream of revenue, one opportunity, the PC market. Now we've introduced five new ones with our traditional space; that's six key markets where we can leverage our core IP. (...) Now let's turn to our traditional businesses. In graphics, we see strong demand in the enthusiast portion of the market. Our industry-leading R7 and R9 products drove GPU revenue growth year-over-year and sequentially.
In short, they're transforming away from their "traditional" business and of the PC market graphics revenue is going to be significant. AMDs x86 CPUs/APUs are going to be a small part of their business, there's a reason Intel is aiming all the big guns at ARM because AMD has already in their strategy decided to get out of the head-to-head competition with Intel. If you don't believe that, read the above lines again. They couldn't compete with Intel when they bet everything on one horse, now they're riding five others as well? That's a slow exit strategy, milking the CPU/APU revenue to execute their transformation. The FX line is probably already dead, Kaveri/Beema/Mullins will keep AMD present in the consumer market a while longer but the revenue is funneled into all those other key areas.