wmbw
"AMD needs quite a lot of heavy lifting to overcome the barriers of even porting a software suite to their measly 64-bit extension."
Guess you are not talking about Server-stuff.
For desktop-suites: Sure. Strongly supported by the fact that very few software-suites are processor-starved these days. Although the technical barrier of porting to AMD-64 is fairly low.
However, there are applications that are hardware-starved. Grafics-applications, e.g. - Across the board from desktop-publishing to CAD. Speech-recognition, maybe, although i am not sure the bottleneck is more the juvenile stage of code here. Games.
Plus everything we know of or do not about is not yet implemented in software-suites for the current installed hardware just lacks to perform sufficiently.
Might take time, yes. But PC buying decisions are made on a horizon of four years. (Or, better said: should be made...)
From a pure rational base (assuming price-levels to be roughly equal) this is nothing short of a no-brainer. (Now, i concede decisions are far from being made from pure rational base.)
As for the strategic plan "to let the industry work for them": Everybody in this industry will continue do the work for his very own success. AMD-64 is just offering an opportunity to do that in a direction AMD will capitalize on as well.
In essence: Your DOF (Doom of failure) is just another word for FUD.
K.
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