"Weren't we all waiting with baited breath for the first socket 939 boards, thinking that 754 would soon be gone?"
And you know how baited breath smells...
Well, I thought Socket754 was a good solution. Admittedly, I was in the minority.
Sure, 4 layers boards are pretty attractive to OEMs. But AMD probably could have let Socket754 have an 8 bit cHTT port for cheap dual socket boards also. The performance difference would have been small for most tasks and it would have played to AMD's strengths and taken advantage of Intel's weaknesses. If someone didn't want to compromise those couple of percent, there would always be an Opteron system. But that would have required Marketing to actually understand such issues.
Salesman: "Ok, before we get to the customer, tell me about our product."
Dilbert: "Well, it is beige and uses electricity."
Salesman: "Whoa! Brain overload!"
Don't get me wrong, I know for a fact that some marketing types and some salesmen know their product line and market as well as anyone else in a given company. However, they rarely are the ones that make the decisions. At least that has been true in the companies I have worked in.
Market Data 
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