CJ, you seem to think that AMD follows an MO when it comes to demonstrating new micro-architectures. What makes you think that all demonstrations they make have to follow historic trends? Intel has made it so that people come to expect interesting workloads during their presentations. AMD's investors and close customers will want to see more than Task Manager running for a few seconds on an unseen system.
But let me humor you anyway, and view this through an historical perspective. Consider as an example: AMD's dual core demo on 8/31/2004.
AMD eventually launched this product on May 31, 2005, which gave them 9 months to get from demo to launch.
If we apply the same validation schedule to AMD's Barcelona chip, which demoed on November 30, 2006, we might expect a launch date somewhere in the vicinity of the end of August. This is quite close to my own estimate, given the complexity of their demo.
So once again, I will propose that the overall quality of the demo is the best indicator of health of the project. If you want to look it the evidence from an historical perspective, by my guess. You'll arrive at the same conclusion.
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