maybe I've figured out the AMD Bulldozer strategy

In my prior post, I came down pretty hard on AMD's recent release of their Bulldozer cpu.  I had concluded that AMD was poisoned from the inside - that they put all their money on an engineer's long-shot idea.  That still might be right - but after giving this more thought, there is another possibility - and I hope I'm right.

I'm a big believer in approaching problems laterally (my first post discusses a lateral approach to goal setting).  What if AMD, instead of tackling Intel head-on, is taking a lateral approach?

Let's face it, AMD and Intel are in a longstanding war.  Intel clearly has more troops (staff), better equipment (their own fabs), and have honed their talents in frontal assault (making insanely fast chips).  Being smaller and without equally good weaponry, AMD has to think laterally.

As a frontal assault, the Bulldozer wasn't a total flop.  AMD made a strong effort - not as strong as the market leader - but strong nonetheless.  Now, remember the big picture - the Bulldozer is just one volley in a longstanding war.  AMD, we have to assume, has something up it's sleeve.

The market for cpus goes beyond the desktop.  In fact, many argue the desktop is a dying breed.  Where are the fastest growing trends for cpus?  Massive servers (many cores, low power) for virtualization, cloud computing, and databases.  (Not to mention tablets and smart phones.)  In AMD's case, guess what?  They actually kick ass in the server space.  Check out the CPU Mark for multi-cpu systems - AMD has three systems in the top five.

Battling over the desktop is like battling over a huge land mass that is becoming less-and-less tactical for the overall war strategy.  My prediction is that AMD will, within the next year, deliver a brutal blow to Intel in the server cpu space.  Intel, will be caught off guard, because their troops are largely amassed for maintaining desktop supremacy.

Do you believe in the future that many pundits predict, of smart phones, tablets, and browser based PC's?   If so, then complex computing is moving more and more to back-end servers.  And if that's the case, then AMD's server strategy is a pretty darn good one.