[citation][nom]Star72[/nom]Kind of a fanboi thing to say, but in overall cpu performance, maybe not. But they also won't in price either. AMD's APUs are a great HTPC option & low budget gaming option. Intel may never catch them in the APU department. Give some credit where it's due will ya?[/citation]
Well, if AMD gets Steamroller out before Haswell and it at least matches Sandy in performance per watt (not an unreasonable gain if Trinity can match or at least come close to Nehalem), then the next release could match Haswell, or at least come close. AMD could be back in the high end for CPUs in the next few years. Bulldozer is really a good architecture, it's just hindered by a poor implementation in the FX designs (150-250 poor engineers do not match 20-30 great engineers in anything except payroll, but AMD corporate guys seem to disagree), huge cache latency, and poor memory controllers. It could be very fast if the non-architectural problems were solved, maybe keep pace with Sandy in performance per watt (Ivy would probably still be out of reach for power efficiency, it's just too efficient to expect AMD to catch up in even two huge improvement releases).
Intel could match AMD in GPU performance if they wanted to, but that would mean that Intel would need to allocate more die area to their IGP and such. It's already pretty big and the majority of Intel's customers would not see a benefit from going from HD 200 to 4000 already since they don't do graphically heavy things, so Intel simply doesn't want to go farther because it would mean increased cost of manufacturing without many people using the improved hardware to the full extent of it's capabilities. Honestly, HD 4000 is kinda overpowered for even HTPC work. The only people that would benefit from it are people who use graphics cards such as a 6570 and above, mostly the entry level gamers. AMD's APUs are focused on that group and although they are making AMD money, are they making enough money for Intel to care and does Intel want to hurt their rival in such a time? Let's not forget how bad things would be for Intel if AMD were to tank under.
Anti-trust lawsuits galore. Intel needs AMD to be successful. So, Intel will leave AMD the lower profit markets while taking the higher profit markets. It works out for Intel who are rich and AMD gets enough money to sty afloat. If AMD can manage to catch Intel or at least close the gap in the next few years, then Intel might need to make some serious leaps to stay far ahead of AMD. The next few years could get much more interesting than the last few.
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