NeoXF The fact that a company that is pushing so much for a ton of software-specific tie-ins to it's hardware (HSA, Mantle...). that don't make or break their hardware, but if they'd work as intended, will surely bring in sales of several magnitutes higher than now... is allocating so little resources to it's software development/partenerships is quite mind-boggling. Don't they have enough hardware concepts/researches/designs for the moment to skimp on those costs and move the money to software dev/Q&A?

AMD's plan for the past decades is based on their vision of the future running tiny cores but a ton of them. Mantle is necessary to boost gaming and more specifically mobile gaming for the long term. Their servers movement direction also reflect that. Think about it, I don't see people sitting around with controllers staring at just one TV screen in the future. Every consoles this generation have already incorporated additional screens. It's obvious that future consoles, if they will still call it that, will be more mobile. You will be more connected and your senses will be bombarded with even more information. Mobile gaming will be mainstream because our hardware is getting to that point that it can handle more serious games. With high density low power cloud servers to offload processing, it is a definite future for mobile gaming.AMD is forced to do spend resources on software because no one else will. Everyone is motivated by money and AMD's grand plan won't work if they don't pay the price 10 years before everyone else. They are basically pushing adoptions and Mantle is meant to change the traditional way of doing things. Have anyone ever wonder how mobile graphics had exponential gains in the past decade? Does anyone remember AMD sold their mobile graphics to the ARM market?I don't think AMD will ever dominate the market like Intel did because they have historically been horrible with marketing and lack any aggression in pushing their products. As far as business tactics goes, AMD is very tame compared to all their peers.