If they get a foothold in another market, the tablet/smartphone market, it will increase their ability to compete with Intel in the desktop segment, as they will have much more capital to invest into R&D to create better solutions, in addition to furthering their experience with creating more efficient processors that can do more work per cycle (where AMD used to beat Intel into the ground).
I wish they would start moving into RISC processing in general, instead of beating the dead x86 horse any longer. As they said in Hackers in 1994, "RISC architecture is gonna change everything." AMD as a company already has experience with creating RISC processors from the late 80's, which is obviously not relevant now, but shows that they do know how to make something other than x86 already.