I think we're all hoping for the best, but in the greater scheme of things, desktop performance/enthusiast CPU segment would likely be a drop in the bucket with regards AMD's overall portfolio and their need to increase marketshare.
For all the talk of people who buy AMD to keep "competition alive", it is basically rubbish....we're all just bystanders watching it unfold. AMD need to get and keep big contracts in:
>OEM desktop where the majority of people wouldn't know or care what CPU they're buying. Just tell them the speed, how much RAM and screen size, and the OEM's only care about lowest price and guaranteed quantity. AMD's larger die area and poorer yield-both resulting in less usable CPU's per wafer-basically means they take a bath (red ink variety) if they try to undercut Intel's pricing
>Server. The big iron sector is ruled by performance-per-watt and performance-per-core (server software licence fee's are often based on per-core usage). This is the big question mark in AMD's future IMO. If BD can haul AMD's server marketshare up from it's present 5.5% to a respectable level then desktop CPU parts continue simply by dint of being a by-product of server CPU design. If not then the future is APU all the way.
As far as desktop goes, how many CPU's would the average computer user/upgrader/builder buy in one year? or two, or three ? The upshot is that you have to make Intel users shift to AMD, and FX for most people isn't a compelling choice over Sandy Bridge. The next iteration pits Piledriver against Ivy Bridge. AMD are on record as saying Piledriver will be 10% better than BD -with a 3-5% increase in IPC (still behind Sandy Bridge in a lot of metrics). Intels roadmap points to
Ivy Bridge being 7+% better performing than Sandy Bridge while using 19% less power which seems to tally with
Coolaler's benchmarking on a clock-for-clock & cache-for-cache comparison.
AMD's saving grace is that Intel have no intention of seeing AMD go under...they just won't allow AMD to make any further progress than they already have in the markets that Intel holds sway. Another point to consider is that even if AMD had the ace products, it's highly dubious whether AMD's foundry partners would have the capacity to help them take advantage of the fact.
I suspect that if Intel really wanted to make AMD's eyes water, they could quite easily drop CPU pricing to that of AMD or below, and make every Intel motherboard chipset as fully featured as X79