To recap recent events:
AMD has lowered Q4 guidance to 25% below Q3. This is a 25% drop for a quarter that is traditionally seasonaly stronger.
Its share price is struggling to maintain a plurality of dollars, revenues are now expected to drop below what analysts already expected as a poor showing.
As a result of all this, Abu Dhabi has either exercised some penalty clauses or decided to renegotiate the split.
AMD's voting interest is unchanged, but further stock shares are being granted to Mubadala and have reduced AMD's ownership of the fab company to about one third.
If stock ownership is the determining factor of the allocation of profits, the fab company is perilously close to ceasing to be a subsidiary under AMD's IP cross-licensing agreement, or at least as the agreement has been publically disclosed.
Capital calls have been indexed at 90% of AMD's net assets, which looks to restrict the fab company's ability to raise cash.
AMD's road maps, drawn up prior to this latest turn of the thumbscrews, already put Fusion into 2011 and at 32nm, which puts Fusion and Bulldozer as a delay of a delay of a delay of a delay.
Bobcat is dead.
We can expect to see Shanghai relatives for the next two years.
AMD's 45nm chips at least initially have shown modest per-clock increases and a few higher speed grades at the same TDP. The first products have socket compatibility with previous chips, which might serve to prevent further erosion in the more value-minded sectors.
At the desktop, AMD is trading blows with the low to high-middle range of Intel's products.
The highest Core2 quads appear to be slightly above, and i7 is above all else.
i7 is too high-end and requires pricey mainboards and memory, which will restrict its uptake.
AMD's pricing the highest PhenomII just below the lowest i7.
Atom is basically uncontested, and recent analysis has shown that while netbooks are cannibalizing some of the laptop low end, they are creating new sales where no units would have sold otherwise.
AMD's laptop share by units has declined, in part because of the cheap netbook sales diluting its numbers.
AMD has no specially-designed mobile processor, and its supposed answer to Atom will be stripped down desktop cores that cannot scale as far down as Atom.
At servers, Shanghai might have a little over a quarter's advantage at 4 socket.
One i7 in SpecInt is about as effective as a two-socket Shanghai.
At SpecFP, the single socket i7 is more than half as effective as doubled Shanghai, but not as catastrophically equivalent.
AMD's 4-socket, with the release of dual socket i7 boards next year, may well be gutted.
The higher core count boards, a niche within a niche, might persist for AMD for a while longer until being hit by Beckton at the same level, and low level IPF from above.
AMD has additional virtualization capabilities to deploy, but those will need new boards and sockets that will not be out for a while.
Graphics remains competitive, though the expectation is that discrete graphics will take a hit next year.