[7beauties]

I've built my first PC in 2000 with the then top of the line AMD Athlon 700Mhz slot A CPU. Since then I've gone through at least three upgrades, all with newer, better Athlons to where I'm currently at with an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ 939 CPU. I was proud of AMD in 2004 when it ruled the roost and made big inroads in Intel's desktop market share. Maximum PC's end of year best of hardware issue featured only AMD procs for 1st place and runner up. But now that seems like so long ago and once again AMD is left in old territory, very late with new introductions that upon release are far behind Intel, forcing AMD to be a "budget-minded" alternative. AMD's fortunes seemed to take a turn for the worse when they over-paid in acquiring ATI. Though I'm still very loyal to AMD, it dismays me that they're repackaging defective Quad Core Procs as three core parts. The Phenoms that they are selling are ridiculous: 2.2Ghz and 2.3Ghz which can't come close in performance against Intel's lowest models. And when AMD does ship higher speed Phenoms at the promised die process of 45nm, how we will savy shoppers know which stepping has corrected the infamous TLB erratum? I'm told that the "GH" stepping of the Opterons are the stepping 3 version with the erratum corrected, but what is the designation for the Phenom that's corrected?

I hope that AMD makes a complete come back, and not as a budget alternative to Intel's silicon, but as the technology leader. Any thoughts? Can anyone brighten my outlook? Whether you're an AMD fan or of Intel, the market place benefits when two rivals compete against one another. The worst thing that could happen is that AMD folds and goes under. Then there would be no reason for Intel to sell any proc affordably, and no reason for them to improve their product line.