In the face of an ever-falling stock price that has dropped to its lowest levels in four years and lost 75 per cent in under two; a lukewarm reception - to put it very mildly - to its quad-core Phenom X4 processor; and recent predictions that it will drop out of the world's top 10 chip makers; Dr. Hector Ruiz, AMD CEO, came out with some fighting talk this last weekend.

Avuncular-looking Ruiz cited the company's recent decline on a number of factors. The most interesting, however, was the blame he put at Intel's door. Quoting him from a Gulf News article, Ruiz commented "If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel".

Wow, wee! Don't hold back there, Hector: you're living up to your name!

Dear, Doctor, we have news for you, though. Put these words in no particular order: 45nm process; quad-core CPUs; high-k metal gate; Centrino; PCI-Express; and USB3.0. Perhaps they've been expunged from the AMD dictionary? You tell us.

Ruiz further opined that "So I would say that Intel is trying to catch up with us in that respect" and loaded the verbal shotgun with this magnificent literary gem "Intel continues... to abuse their monopoly and that's why around the world governments and regulatory agencies continue to go after them."

We reckon that AMD has sound technology and needs to ride out the next 18 months or so, to steady the good ship, and then re-think its strategy. It needs to raise the average selling price for its desktop processors, currently hampered by Intel's aggressive across-the-board pricing, and then, somehow, claim technology leadership with the much-awaited Bulldozer core.

Let's hope the recent cash injection from the Abu Dhabi outfit can keep AMD ticking along and, more importantly, give the consumer real, honest-to-goodness choice for their CPUs, motherboards and graphics cards.

Source: Gulf News.