The gradual demise of AMD - What happened and what to do next?

As I woke up this morning, I was greeted with a message from Steve (our news guy) in relation to an interesting article posted over at Overclockers.com. I read Greg's thoughts on AMD, and found myself dumbfounded by some of the comments, so much so that I thought I had to express my own thoughts on the AMD situation in this editorial.

There is no doubt that AMD is in a world of "woe" as Greg put it so delicately. It is in big trouble financially and you would think that it is in almost too deep to come back. Stranger things have happened but it really does not look good for AMD at the moment.

Let's discuss what happened and what can they do next.

Where did all the 939 boards go?

I am no Intel fan boy but like most enthusiasts, I simply prefer the better processor. For example, we ran an Athlon X2 Socket 939 system as our graphics card test bed for a long time and we did some articles that revolved around building the ultimate gaming PC which included the FX processor series from AMD. At that time life was good for AMD, even to the point where computer stores were installing AMD processors into new Ma and Pa systems. Market share was up, which in turn meant profit was up. AMD was riding a wave, and a damn big one you could say. So what happened? Basically overnight it cut Socket 939 processors, and motherboards based on this socket from performance companies like DFI became practically impossible to find.

A large amount of people do not really understand the computer market and how Socket 939 boards went dry. It went a little something like this…