Gopher, Re: "Try checking out the shelves in Europe. Why should AMD stock retail shelves in recession-bound US when there are relatively healthy markets elsewhere?"
That may be. AMD may have shifted their inventory outside of the U.S., but one thing's for sure: over here, retail volumes of Athlon PCs are scarce.
I went to Best Buy today for a digital camera, and I saw that AMD had two desktop systems in the whole store: a 1.2GHz Athlon and a 1.3GHz Athlon. Not a single Athlon XP to be seen. The rest were all Pentium 4 and Celeron. AMD did have more of a presence in the mobile section, but those were mostly Duron. I think there was one Athlon laptop, 3 Duron laptops, and the rest were Pentium III.
Meanwhile, signs are showing the U.S. retail markets as improving quite a bit. Best Buy was very crowded, and people were buying large TVs, PCs, and other gifts. While the Christmas season is approaching, I think this is a good sign. Americans want to stay home and watch TV or play games, rather than traveling. I think that's becoming more and more obvious.
AMD may be losing a huge opportunity by underselling here in the U.S. Of course, that's a fortunate thing for Intel.
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