While the announcement in and of itself isn't that big a whoop it does bring up a more interesting question: Which will be more important in the future, the CPU or the GPU?

As we have seen with the Brazos platform as well as liano (I believe bulldozer is a server chip they tried to push into a consumer market that it simply wasn't designed for because they needed product) it appears that AMD believes it is the GPU that will be of primary importance. As someone who deals with consumers 6 days a week I can see their reasoning, as more and more of my customers are more concerned with multimedia than raw number crunching and lets face it after dual cores PCs became "good enough" for the uses that the average consumer has. i have built several E350 based units for office as well as home and the extremely low power while having "good enough" CPU and hardware accelerated video does make for a nice platform. As we have read the next push from AMD will be switching the GPU from VLIW to vector based which since it will be built into the core would allow the GPU to behave as a "super floating point" thus meaning the CPU can be even simpler

Then you have the Intel stance which is to pare what they consider a "good enough" GPU with a high performance CPU. this design too has merits as if you have a powerful enough CPU then what the GPU does can often be done by the CPU instead. There is also the question of how much pure number crunching can be done on the GPU VS the CPU as it will take time to learn how to program for the GPU (although OpenCL may help in this regard) whereas the CPU is known by developers and thus easier to program for.

So I'd say that is an interesting question, whether to go for the power in the GPU or in the CPU. Using myself and my customers I'd say AMD has a good strategy for the consumer market whereas Intel has a good strategy for the business. After all Suzy the checkout girl isn't manipulating huge spreadsheets or dealing in large databases but there are plenty of business uses for having serious number crunching ability. I could easily see the split happening along those lines, with the consumer units, be it netbook/nettop, laptop, or desktop being AMD while the workstations and business laptops belong to Intel but i think it will be interesting in the next few years to see how it shapes up.

I will say whomever at AMD killed the Phenom/Athlon lines was an idiot and should get a good firing, the BD design simply isn't good for the consumer, its too expensive with frankly less bang for the buck than the Thuban and Deneb chips which often curb stomp it in all but its highest SKU and its pretty obvious that while its a good server design (as integer heavy highly threaded loads are more prevalent there) its simply not a good deal for consumers. I would have stuck with Bobcat on mobile, maybe adding a 4 core version for the more midrange machines, and kept Thuban (since it can fit everything that used to be covered by Phenom/Athlon simply by flipping off cores and/or cache which also made it a more attractive target for those who wished to try turning on disabled cores) and waited to see if integrating a vector based GPU would bring the increased performance to replace Thuban.

But in either case the next couple of years should be interesting as we see which strategy pays off and for which markets.

BD was Dirk's baby and he was the first to fall on his sword. Personally, I think BD turned out well given the fact that AMD was teetering on the brink of financial collapse for the majority of the design cycle. It won't be much longer before Trinity gives a second look at what the BD core can do in a consumer SKU.