Dan, Re: Just looking at Fujitsu's S2000 and Averatec's thin&light shows that while they may have gotten very few wins, so far, they've been fielding a competitive chip for quite a while.
I've only seen these two laptops in THG reviews, and the Banias configured laptop had far greater performance and far greater battery life.
Re: Meanwhile Intel really doesn't have a credible competitor to Athlon 64 HE.
I'm a big fan of lower power, but I'm not sure that the rest of the world is. AMD's advantage here depends on the size of the market that desires 55W computing. I'll admit, however, that AMD's presence here is very competitive, so maybe this will turn out to be a very successful venture.
Re: SOI obviously needs a design and a FAB to go with it, but absent its SOI process AMD would not have been able to crush Intel's strategic plans.
Dan, the difference between success and failure is not simply reduced to the availability of one or two speed grades. AMD was hitting 2.2GHz on their bulk process with Athlon XP. Don't tell me that the K8 micro-architecture was built with smaller frequency prospects, because I doubt that. I really don't see how SOI has made a significant difference.