2009: The Year of AMD's Possible Comeback

As most of you already know, AMD has lost the leading position in the high-end consumer market for quite some time now. Up until now, Intel has been king in the high-performance CPU market, thus leaving plenty of room for AMD to deal with the energy efficient market. Because it lacks the performance punch, AMD's processors are taken into consideration only when it comes to talking about the best performance/price ratio - which is where AMD can supply quite a few decent products. From the looks of things, it appears that the situation is going to remain unchanged at least until 2009.

Then again, don't go thinking that the beginning of next year is also going to revitalize AMD's CPU business. As a matter of fact, the company is expected to provide a decent competitor for Intel's soon-to-be released Nehalems only in the second half of 2009. According to various sources, AMD's new 45nm Deneb and Propus CPUs won't immediately solve the problems of the green company. Although Deneb will be significantly faster than the Barcelona or Agena cores, they won't stand much of a chance versus the Nehalem.

Sometime during the second half of 2008, Advanced Micro Devices is expected to start a manufacturing process transition. However, until the company gets high K, its 45nm-enabled CPUs aren't going to provide any major improvement in performance, and they will most certainly not be able to compete with Intel's new lineup.

Intel's Nehalem and Yorkfield together with the dual-core Penryns are already using high K 45nm and, apparently, Nehalem's transistors are more efficient than AMD's, at least when it comes to this manufacturing process.

So, even if AMD does not become a real competitor for Intel's high-performance lineup, any news of a possible comeback should please users, especially those diehard AMD fans out there - back in the days when AMD's CPUs still packed a massive punch, the manufacturer was among the all-time favorites of the gaming community.