Let's be honest for a second. We are not actually asking you whether you believe AMD's current CPU strategy is working or not. It's a well known fact AMD is getting killed out there and at the pace Intel is going, 2009 could be an even bleaker year for the #2 CPU maker. Good thing the company's graphics division (ATI) is not doing half as bad nowadays.

But if we are going to discuss a brighter future for AMD, we should probably forget about their current processor line-up. The first crop of Phenoms were a bit of a disaster and the second came to be too little too late. One could say that while it lasted it was the older Athlon products and the workstation-oriented Opterons that made the day for AMD, but that's no longer enough. The company desperately needs a mainstream CPU that can truly compete with Intel Core products in both performance and pricing fronts.


What we know so far is that the Phenom II is coming sometime next year, hopefully during the first quarter. The revamped processors may get a process shrink to 45-nanometers, and thus faster clock speeds and run more efficiently. Add some cache to the equation and you end up with a product that could compete with the Core i7 if AMD times this thing right. Also in store for AMD are low-power processors based on older Athlon technology, and eventually dual and triple core versions of the Phenom II.

With all this in mind, do you believe AMD is on a collision course next year? Could the company be forced out of its main market to focus on things like graphics, embedded or mobile? Did you invest in an AMD platform over this past year? What would be your reaction if all of a sudden Intel was the lone player in the mainstream CPU market?

Discuss.