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The Intel juggernaut continued to roll forward in 2007, but all eyes were on AMD.

Intel continued to recapture market share from its main competitor. The world’s largest semiconductor company aggressively shipped new products, and even managed to slip in one CPU based on the company’s shiny new 45nm manufacturing process before year’s end. The Core 2 Extreme QX9650 is currently the top performing desktop CPU available.

Despite Intel’s aggressive product push, most industry watchers were focused on AMD. AMD’s K10 “true” quad-core CPUs were the company’s last best hope on the processor front, as it was forced to slash prices on a dual core product line that looked anemic next to Intel’s Core 2 architecture. These price cuts, coupled with continued delays in shipping the K10, resulted in massive financial losses.

When AMD’s server quad-core processors began to ship in late August, rumblings began to surface about anemic performance. AMD had been unsuccessful in shipping the new server CPU at higher clock frequencies, but even discounting clock rate, performance looked less than stellar.

When the quad-core desktop CPU, Phenom, arrived on the scene, AMD could only muster enough performance and clock rate to compete with Intel’s lowest-end quad-core offering. Even that matchup tended to favor Intel.

Then, after finally shipping its long-awaited K10, serious bugs appeared in the way the TLB (translation lookaside buffer) works. While AMD has offered a workaround, the fix degrades the performance, something the company can’t afford. The bug is more serious on server side CPUs, however. While it does exist in the desktop Phenom CPUs, it’s less likely to appear, so AMD has asked motherboard makers to build the ability to enable or disable the feature in their BIOS settings.

For AMD, 2007 has been a disastrous year. Substantial financial losses, sub-par quad core CPU products and missteps in the company’s graphics division has shaken both customer and investor confidence. It remains to be seen whether or not AMD can regain its stride in 2008. One thing is for sure: 2008 will be a make or break year for AMD. Continued…