albert, Re: "re: Intel has traditionally won out.
that is what amd is fighting against. In "true" competitive environment products are chosen based on merits rather than labels."
There are many ways to judge the "merit" of a PC. It's not just based on the benchmarked performance of the CPU, or just the price of the CPU. If it were, AMD would probably have much more of an upper hand. Instead, most CPUs sold in the market are bundled as part of a complete system, at which point the price difference between the CPUs becomes less relevant, and the strength and stability of the platform become a lot more relevant. That's one reason Intel continues to excel, and the other is the good relationships that Intel has with their partnering OEMs (which, again, sell the majority of the CPUs).
At this point, Intel really doesn't need to price their products more competitively. They are already selling out. Intel is also improving the performance of these chips, and making them smaller and cooler with the Northwood core. That's a definite benefit for the coming quarters. Seasonally, Q1 is also the smallest quarter of the year. While an improving economy is estimated to make Q1 equally as strong as Q4, Intel will also be increasing their capacity, and thus their ability to meet larger demand. AMD will have room to lower prices, and again try to price their way to market share. However, with less in their favor, the task of maintaining gained market share becomes much harder. If they gain several percentage points this quarter, when things are good and demand is up, they will probably lose it next quarter, when Intel is more competitive, and demand is down.
AMD should and probably is trying to change this, but how are they going about it? Through marketing model numbers, and more trash talking from their CEO? I don't see any plans to change their business model from what it was several quarters ago. I don't see any new marketing ideas, any ad campaigns, or any new promotional events. AMD still relies on word of mouth and the strength of benchmarks, as well as the obvious pricing incentives, to sell their chips. Even with a performance advantage and lower pricing, AMD barely managed to keep their market share in Q2 and Q3. I don't see how they can avoid the same fate in Q1.
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