With Nehalem grabbing the headlines, I have to ask what happened to AMD's Bulldozer architecture? It would be great to have a clock for clock competitive AMD CPU, as an alternative to Intel's upcoming Gulfstown and Sandy Bridge.
Neither of these are gonna be around anytime soon. Intel needs to get i5 out first, and being in a market thats dropping like a stone I cant see Intel rushing any more new tech out (lets face it, who's gonna by it?). As for Bulldozer (16 cores, modular deisgn, 32nm), it's still not gonna see light of day till 2011 at the earliest.
Yes, these are way down the road. The 32nm die shrink of Nehalem will happen before that. My opinion of what AMD needs more than anything is to answer Intel platforms, not just CPUs. I thought that was the point of buying ATI, but the seem to have been moving pretty slowly lately. It doesn't look like their current stuff is doing so well as competition for i7, but maybe they can get some of the i5 market segment when it comes out.
I have a Phenom 940 in one of my machines, it's a good chip and a good value. It's not as fast as my 965, but cost $800 less.
The Gulftown is part of the 32nm shrink of the Nehalem, and according to the roadmaps, it should be out in 1 years time, so not too long to wait. I agree, AMD really need a low cost / low power platform to compete with the Atom.
