Last January, AMD’s Board of Directors dismissed company CEO Dirk Meyer. The board’s abrupt firing of the man widely credited for guiding the company back to profitability and helming the successful launch of the first Fusion parts in AMD’s lineup caught everyone off guard. At the time, the only reason the BoD gave was that it disagreed with Meyer over the importance of mobile products to AMD’s future.

The company’s “explanation” was perceived as irritatingly vague at the time, but may make more sense in the wake of Bulldozer’s debut. Interlagos taped out in Q2 2010, reports indicate that the company had samples in hand by Q4. It’s entirely possible that AMD knew as early as January that Bulldozer wasn’t going to deliver the performance that it was hoping for. At that point, company executives may have had to make a choice: Focus primarily on fixing Bulldozer, or take a different path?

Astrologers to short-tempered kings with a bad habit of killing the messenger have it easy compared to prognosticators tasked with predicting the performance of a new processor architecture. The reason most CPU change is evolutionary is that designing new architectures from the ground up is incredibly difficult.

Put properly in context, Bulldozer is a rough, disappointing first effort, but not a terrible one. The real problem is that AMD can’t afford to bet wrong when it comes to choosing where to invest its extremely limited funds. Because of this, it’s possible that AMD’s Board of Directors saw Bulldozer’s problems — and chose, instead, to bet on Bobcat. That’s not to say that AMD is abandoning the desktop or server markets, but the company may feel Bobcat/Brazos has a better chance of driving profits while Bulldozer is in the shop.

Bobcat, after all, is actually faster (by an average of ~15 percent) than the Intel Atom it competes against. At the moment, Bobcat’s performance is too low to give it much traction outside the netbook segment, but that could change next year. Leaked slides claim that the 28nm version of the processor will deliver “up to 20% performance improvement vs. Ontario” and a quad-core configuration. The combination of the two improvements could give second-generation Bobcat chips enough muscle to replace Llano at the low end of the notebook market.

Bobcat bounds beyond netbooks

Intel’s Atom revenue has been slumping for several quarters, partly thanks to increased uptake of Brazos, but mostly due to the increasing popularity of tablets. That likely suits Intel fine — netbooks were a fringe market that unexpectedly exploded. Atom was always meant to drive handheld products and Intel has consistently chosen to focus on cutting the chip’s power draw rather than increasing its performance.

With tablets rapidly replacing netbooks as preferred secondary computing platforms, AMD can’t rely on Brazos selling into that market long-term. Sunnyvale will launch its first custom-built low-power SoC next year, codenamed Hondo, but the upcoming 28nm Enhanced Bobcat parts (Krishna and Wichita) aren’t aimed at the tablet market. Those of you who’ve paid attention to AMD’s position on netbooks for the past few years may recall that Sunnyvale was never particularly excited about their prospects and preferred to focus on driving richer multimedia experiences at somewhat higher price points. Some of this was by necessity, since AMD didn’t have anything like a netbook part at the time, but Bobcat definitely reflects AMD’s general goal of driving richer content.

Recent leaked slides claim both Krishna and Wichita will be single-chip solutions that integrate CPU, GPU, and southbridge. There are further rumors that AMD plans to use these chips to create ultrabook-style systems of its own, albeit at much lower price points. We may even see the two chips debut as server parts, depending on whether or not AMD chooses to respond to Intel’s upcoming Atom-based servers.

Next page: The future of AMD and the unenviable mess it has landed itself in