Wasn't all this obvious when the decision was made to develop hammer in the first place? Add to that the extreme uncertainty around SOI and you have one of the most irresponsible decisions of the modern tech era. Once again the shareholders foot the bill for Jerry's vendetta.
While I accept that there are risks, I actually prefer the third party approach, and I think Ruiz is better at schmoozing with these companies than Jerry was. I think the risks are less than an in-house approach would be, and it will enrich the platform as a whole. It's a good thing to have alot of chipsets running around, more competition, more choice, cheaper overall systems. If there are enough partners it spreads the risk of a buggy product (excepting the CPU itself, of course).
The all in-house approach that Intel is going after with Centrino and Itanium is bad for consumers and alienates the very same companies that AMD is schmoozing. Now, companies go where the money is and even if Craig Barrett said nasty things about every CEO in Tawain, they would still make motherboards for him. The thing is, though, that if Intel crowds these guys out of the choicest markets, they instantly become AMD's best friends.
That's why I don't think it matters whether Intel is strongarming or not. If there's money to be made in Opteron, someone will step in. If Intel sees to it that there's little money to be made in Itanium/Centrino/P5,6,7, then they will go elsewhere. No doubt new companies will rise on the back of Opteron--like the Rioworks outfit Dan3 mentioned. Probably some others will play it wrong and fall off. The beauty is, AMD just stands back and watches while these guys develop the best products they can. If AMD holds up its end and delivers quality products on time and in quantity (and that's the real "if" for me), then I don't really see the downside to having third party infrastructure developers.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
