It's almost sickening enough to want them just to shutter their doors and give any cash they have to lobbyists to get the DOJ to go all antitrust on Intel's ass.
In anycase, the whole microserver hype seemed a bit suspect from the start.
AMD's "Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom" division made a profit, but it was more than wiped out by losses in other divisions. Consoles are a seasonal business and Q1 is a slow quarter after all the holiday sales in Q4. AMD's PC processors are so bad they generally have to sell them below cost to sell any at all.
give any cash they have to lobbyists to get the DOJ to go all antitrust on Intel's ass.
AMD won[1] two antitrust lawsuits against Intel already, but a billion-dollar settlement doesn't go very far when you're competing against Intel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v.....
[1] Spare us the pedantry.
Whoever would be looking at "how Atom is doing" all they'll see is that "those chips are profitable" - despite the fact in the actual mobile/smartphone market Intel is selling chips below-cost against the competition to try and steal market share from them. It's also a great way to hide billions upon billions of losses in the smartphone market for years from shareholders, because all the shareholders will see is that the "Client Group is profitable" thanks to the PC profit offset.
By the time the antitrust bodies wake up to it, Intel will probably already take out a few ARM chip makers and have a significant market share in mobile (I'm still skeptical about that one, but that doesn't change the fact that Intel is playing very unfair right now and those tactics could help them greatly in the long term).
It's also already too late to fix the damage Intel has done with its "bundled" GPUs in laptops against Nvidia and also AMD. In the first few years nobody cared because "Intel graphics suck anyway, and you'll need an Nvidia dedicated GPU for your laptop". So the fact that Intel essentially coerced OEMs into putting their crappy GPUs in laptops that nobody asked for or wanted, so that consumers get used to them, was completely ignored by antitrust bodies.
But it was quite obvious to me even then that it would be just a matter of time before those GPUs got good enough to replace most Nvidia GPUs from laptops (hello disruptive innovation theory!).
Now you see consumers everywhere actually ask to have the latest integrated Intel GPU - i.e. the damage is already done by its anti-competitive bundling tactics, and no fine will fix that unless we're talking $5+ billion given to Nvidia and AMD, or the antitrust bodies outright ban Intel from bundling its GPU with its CPUs anymore (highly unlikely, especially as now Intel will argue that doing so would cause "great harm to the performance/cost of its chips").
For a moment I agreed. But then I realised that it could be said that the reason they won the contracts is that their competitors didn't think it was profitable at that price.
-Both wanted x86 for better usability (PS3 Cell was a hard-to-tame beast for many devs, ARM not strong enough)
-Intel was not interested in manufacturing semi-custom chips
-Nvidia simply did not have x86 licenses
-AMD was left as the only option
Of course other things also factored in the big picture, profit margins for example, but those are more known.
That's the result that you want after a long slog of debugging. It's not as fun to dig into something for 12h and finally find a misplaced parenthesis.
I find Matt Dillon's enthusiasm and humbleness admirable. He's been active for donkey's years, pumping out stuff since the days of comp.os.amiga (if memory serves), and created his own filesystem and BSD distro, AFAIK not out of vanity but to do and share research.
People like him should get more public recognition.
If they can develop a hugged ARM story, I could see that being compelling.