Regarding the poor performance in the Client segment, I think you are too harsh on the AMD management. Most likely, in my view, there has been no way to win against Intel lately, due to the immense imbalance between supply and demand. AMD and Intel have both been ramping capacity over the last few years, and now that there is very little demand suddenly, Intel has decided that clearing inventory and keeping fabs utilised are more important than retaining high margins (see Message 34366685 for graphs).
Probably, AMD's choice has been between participating at a (even bigger) loss, if at all, or stepping away and relinquishing share. As we've seen before, Lisa Su is prepared to step away from low margin business, instead focusing limited resources in high margin areas. Regarding the latter, AMD has made an effort to participate in the high-end gaming notebook market this year with the Dragon Range series.
P.S. By the way, there may be unreported (or underreported) technical issues that explain the lack of models using the latest of AMD's notebook CPUs. For example:
"The creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, has expressed his frustration with AMD's Firmware Trusted Platform Module 'fTPM.' In a recent mailing list for the open-source kernel, Torvalds described the fTPM as 'crud' and suggested that the best thing to do would be to disable it for hardware random number generation."
Linus Torvalds suggests disabling AMD's 'stupid' fTPM to solve a persistent stuttering issue | TechSpot |
