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Since Jaxa has stirred the topic, I thought I would share my thoughts on AMD at length. Before the Bulldozer released, AMD was repeatedly emphasizing that this processor would NOT be remarkable at traditional x86 workloads. Their assertion has been that 99% of those workloads are already serviced by half-decade old processors and the future of CPU workloads is "parallel". AMD even acknowledged that their upcoming design would be short on Floating Point processing because their strategy was to move Floating Point workloads to the GPU. Then when the processor was released all the Benchmark sites sensationalized the "shocking" benchmark results for benchmarks that AMD already had admitted would be weak areas for the new architecture. The biggest contention point: "CPU heavy games that need lots of Floating Point math". It's simply tragic that all these hardware pundits have lost the thread. AMD is moving to further integrate their GPU products into their CPU. When that comes to fruition, AMD CPU's will have MOUNTAINS of Floating Point power. It will be the most media rich CPU since the heyday of the PowerPC and it's AltiVec instructions. Right now, the AMD CPU might be a sliver shy of Floating Point but you can buy a GPU to remedy that deficiency. All it will take is for software developers to make more strides towards GP-GPU and the modest advantage that Intel has in Floating Point will be irrelevant. When you upgrade your Bulldozer to a Fusion version, you've got a damned super-computer on a chip. The only poor decision by AMD in this grand plan is that they sacrificed the cost of hand-tuning the transistors on their latest CPU in favor of using software automated circuit layouts (thus wasting MILLIONS of transistors). Sadly, is seems that the bad vibes from all these reviews are rubbing off on the flippant management over at AMD and I fear that they will scale back or cancel this grand engineering vision. The next process node was just cancelled (in favor of a delay to the one after) and I hope that Fusion wasn't scrapped along with it. I hope that AMD survives this brutal period of poor esteem in the hardware enthusiast community and can at least get one valiant foot in the door for a true heterogeneous parallel core x86 CPU (that takes IBM and Toshiba's "Cell" processor approach to it's ultimate conclusion). If at least a DX11 low-mid-range GPU becomes the new "minimum" amount of on-CPU floating point power, then games can become wildly more rich in physics and AI. We can only hope that this trend would keep on escalating. Let's not even think of how poorly the Opteron line is doing. (Though, I'd still like to see how it fares in massive parallel HPC benches,)