Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

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Bob, Re: INTC was lucky that the Israelis were able to bail them out. To my way of thinking that just highlights the ineptitude of the rest of the company. Personally, if it were me I would throw away the rest of the company and let the Israelis show what they really can do.

That's an incredibly naive statement. No offense intended, but it shows a complete lack of understanding when it comes to design teams vs the corporation.

The Israeli team may have had brilliant designers, but the notion of Centrino started at the top of management. The design goals percolated down to architects, who digested it into design considerations. Then the platform groups put together the ingredients, the marketing groups defined the brand, and finance gave them a budget. And that doesn't even cover manufacturing, which is ultimately the magic ingredient to power and performance optimized designs.

Throw away the rest of the company, and you are left with something like Transmeta, a company with a good idea, a great product, but no means to execute on it.

P.S. I agree that Prescott is one of the worst mistakes a management team ever made, but look at how well Intel is making it work. Intel is a world class corporation with enough strength to make even the crappiest designs sell into the tens of millions per quarter. They don't need a complete management turn-over to be successful; all they need is a lesson learned, like they did with Rambus, which of course resulted in Intel's current leadership in the DRAM technology market. Whether you believe DDR2 in its current form is a superior technology, at least it's cutting edge, and the rest of the industry supports it. It's an amazing difference from Intel's incredibly late entry into the DDR market after Rambus. I think the same lessons can be learned about optimizing performance with power as a primary consideration. It's not a completely new concept; it will simply be new in the way that Intel prioritizes it, when they previously prioritized megahertz. Corporate wise, Intel is as strong as it ever was.