People put way too much emphasis on holding the "performance crown." Never mind the fact that this accounts for less than 1% of the income for Intel/AMD. (and way, way less than that in terms of number of CPUs sold) And also never mind the fact that for the most part they're pointless CPUs to have anyway; most of us have agreed that while sure, the i7 3960X may be king of the hill, it's just not worth the $1,049US price it asks. Instead, we look at a much cheaper end: most of us are saying that there's no point for even an Intel fan to get something beyond the 2500K, which is a COMPLETELY different market at $225US. And of course, even at that level, it's been seen that it's still a waste for Battlefield 3.
At this range, AMD does have competitors; it doesn't matter that it's their very BEST CPUs are what it takes to compete, but as long as they provide comparable performance for the price, they're competitors. All this emphasis on Bulldozer is forgetting that in terms of price-point competition, AMD's still had competitors in the form of both Deneb and Thuban, ALL of which can be had for well under $200US.
And more importantly yet are the sub-enthusiast markets, which are bigger still: in that market, Intel's not been able to compete in YEARS: Celerons only sell because they have the Intel brand name on them, and I think everyone here can agree that they are by and far a joke. I'll take a cheap Athlon/Phenom II or Llano over a Celeron ANY day of the week.
And as Kyuuketsuki pointed out, in the low-end market, having a good APU is more important than good CPU. And again, Intel's GPUs have always been an utter joke; it's just been whether it's a big crack-up (like Intel "Extreme") or a running gag. (like Larrabee) Simply put, they have no hope of competing with the integrated Evergreen-based GPUs on Bobcat APUs. For the mainstream-level stuff, the 320+ stream processors to be found in a Llano APU actually make a strong argument for a real GAMING computer without a discrete GPU.
And likewise, at the low-power end so critical for netbooks and the like, Atom, which was once hailed as a masterpiece, is woefully inadequate to compete with AMD's netbook-level fusion APUs; even on the CPU level, an Atom rings vastly worse per-clock performance without being able to up the clock to make up for it... And often while consuming MORE power. Once you throw in the GPU suitable for low-end gaming on the AMD chip's side, it's no contest.
And yeah, Intel's had some embarassing flops with their technology in the past, even with their esteemed flagships. Some might know, as mavikt does, that it was actually Tom's itself, for instance, that discovered the flaws that kept Pentium III from passing 1 GHz, while AMD's Athlon blew past it and beat it in every way, and then a few years later, Pentium 4 hit a wall before 4 GHz, and got thoroughly trashed by the Athlon64. It's only a matter of time before it happens again; it just appears that Bulldozer wasn't to be that.
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