Core count just for the sake of core count is a mistake that can hurt you.   Ask Samsung Exnos Octa core, they will tell you all about it.

The best companies are thinking clearly about a particular USE when they put a chip together.    The chip is optimized completely for that use and by golly it knocks your socks off in that use.    

Generic chipsets aren't going to win much going forward when fighting against supremely fitted & tuned for that particular use chipsets.

So, AMD is in a bad place right now, the PC market is shrinking far far faster than anyone had envisioned.  AMD never really made it into phone space, really.

Intel has PC on the brain too and will continue to hold on to that space tightly with their new vaporware but soon to be real lower power consuming chipsets.   Intel will miss on their attempts at killing off ARM, but they will take out AMD with their various attempts to unseat ARM.

Or ARM will take out AMD in their efforts to stay ahead of Intel.   Take your pick, either one is bad news for AMD.

It is an AMD frog in the blender scenario and it doesn't matter which of the two blades does the damage this time on this particular revolution.   The frog is still getting shorter rather quickly.

Fact:  The only companies growing rapidly right now are Chinese and Taiwanese phone makers (they make the phones for all the big players nowadays).

 Broadcom and Freescale are rapidly going down the same path Texas Instruments took a year ago -- so get the heck out now before you lose your ass completely guys.    That ARM vs Intel whirring blender has room in it for the both of you and what little is left of AMD.  

My, that frothy reddish water looks downright nasty, doesn't it?

Apple is beginning to suck wind from the finance world as is Microsoft.   Neither can sell enough of anything to make the necessary profits to make Wall Street happy.   The war between Apple and Wintel is beginning to smell like a shrinking cage death match and unless the new Apple can innovate into new areas like Jobs did, they are going down too.



Ugly, ain't it?   I hope Apple's Christmas surprise new product is a really good one ....

Irony -- Global Foundaries a subsidiary that AMD dumped off as a profit diluter 5 years ago is doing well right now, much much better than AMD itself is doing.

Speed is the key thing to look for -- whoever identifies and fills new niches the quickest will be the survivor.

Cadence / IBM / Nvidia is now moving on the low energy server farm chip thing that AMD was going for, as is Intel.   AMD is likely going to falter and die before they actually get anywhere in that new industry as they are so poorly rated now nobody would actually buy a set of their data farm products for fear AMD wouldn't be around in two years to take care of the stuff.

Look for ARM's roadmap to the future to get a lot tighter in and much more "use specific".   Focus will go back to power usage again and really go after smooth scalability and such rather than go after more raw power.

Samsung can also tell you another neat thing they just learned, the existing chipsets we have now are far more powerful than the existing needs we have -- we got chips now that we can't wring out all the way.   No use exists for all the power they can swing.

And a tightly optimized older Qualcom Snapdragon A-9 based design really is the best phone chip out there right now because it IS so tightly optimized for a specific use.   And the price can be good because the tech development costs and the production lines are all paid for already.

Hey, it isn't the fastest, or the most powerful, it just hands you your head by doing that specific job the absolute best of anybody (which happens to be the job most folks want right now, a really good long lasting Jellybean based cell phone/tablet).