It’s Q3 -- the tail end of the quarter, in fact -- and AMD has yet to make a firm statement on its manufacturing plans. While Hector Ruiz said he would be “the most disappointed man on Earth” if AMD hadn’t shared plans for its manufacturing strategy by the end of the year, many industry watchers and participants are expecting news on the chip maker’s plans by the end of this quarter and their wariness of the company is growing as each silent week passes.

This opinion piece is going to be a little darker than every one I’ve ever written, except my Artificial Intelligence piece. To begin with I would like to state for the record that my main desktop computer is an AMD Athlon X2 4400+ based machine with 2GB memory, an ASUS motherboard and apart from the motherboard completely crashing in mid-operation on my desktop in January of this year, it worked perfectly right up until that point.

There is just no comparison right now. And I would not feel safe buying an AMD processor and plugging it into my system because who knows if I would not have gotten one of the fringe parts that is close to tolerance in terms of speed or heat.

Frankly this is one of the stupidest posts I have seen in a long, long time about AMD. It contridicts itself. AMD is too cheap apparently. I'm fairly certain AMD CPUs are not fringe parts close to their tolerances in terms of speed or heat. In fact the last system we built, with an X2 5000+ at 2.6GHz used a simple aluminum heatsink with no copper, and no heatpipes, and overclocked to 3GHz easily. I would suggest the author do some sort of research before putting an article like this out again. It really boggles the mind how off base it is, and how none of it is based in reality. It reminds of the time I heard Kim Komando say on her computer radio show that all AMD processors were overclocked a few years ago. It really is that naive, and ill written.

Commenting on the positive rating on AMD, the firm said, "We expect the Company to largely meet street estimates of $1.45 billion or up 7% Q/Q. Any upside will primarily be from share gains in graphics due to miscues at Nvidia. The Company will likely continue losing share to Intel in the core processor business. Lower expenses could support upside in operating income, but break-even remains a stretch goal. As the graphics market peaks in September, incremental growth in December will be more muted."

Green PC designs have become more than just practical; they're cool. Power-sipping Netbooks are in, as are small desktops like the Dell Studio Hybrid and Hewlett-Packard Pavilion Slimline. This is not the case for high-end gaming PCs, where bigger is better. How far this trend can go isn't clear, but a seminal event in Apple's history may offer a lesson. In 2001, Apple unveiled one of the first dual-processor consumer systems, based on the overheating-prone IBM PowerPC G4 processor. The original Apple tower design had a Rube Goldberg feel to it, with a host of fans straining to rid the system of heat. A noise like that emitted by a wind tunnel, generated by the power supply and fans, forced Apple to redesign the system.

"In the three years that we have been running the UVCs in Gugulethu, we have had only two incidences of downtime and that was because one computer had a broken keyboard and the other a broken mouse," explained Imi Mosaheb, AMD's South African country manager. The labs are already producing positive results with student marks rising by 15 to 20 per cent at one school. The initiative has also helped train more than 75 teachers in computer skills and brought internet access to 7,000 young Africans.

AMD seems to be pretty quiet about it, perhaps for good reason. First, it's called an Athlon X2 6500 Black Edition. The number would seem to imply that it is faster than K8-based X2s, which is somewhat dubious given that it runs at only 2.3GHz, and K8-based X2s have gotten up to 3GHz. Second, the rather quiet introduction of this chip makes you wonder a bit about AMD's strategy. As we pointed out back in February, production of dual-core chips is an indicator that a CPU maker is actually capable of making a serious percentage of new generation/new process chips. Dual-cores were supposed to be out in Q2, and when they didn't come out, there were reports that they weren't going to come out at all. So what happened? Why are these here? There are three possibilities: