I suppose you've taken dancing classes? You're quite good at dodging the point.
Leave my dancing classes out of this. I don't know what you think "the point" is, but to me it's AMD's declining profits and how HSA isn't helping them.
Compare GPGPU's benefits in those workstation programs with the potential benefits of AVX2. Will AVX2 replace them in the near future? No... not a chance.
Again, those non-GPGPU workstation applications don't affect AMD's bottom line in any noticeable way.
Meanwhile AVX2 will more than double the throughput computing power for the majority of the market. Furthermore, it will take very minimal developer effort to tap into that, contrary to GPGPU. And four cores with AVX2 are actually more powerful than a GT2, so don't overestimate the benefits of GPGPU by looking at huge GPUs. AVX2 will undoubtedly have a far greater effect on consumer choice than GPGPU. When Haswell launches, we'll probably see lots of multimedia benchmarks where Intel is over two times faster than AMD. Developers won't adopt HSA just to do AMD a favor. It's a lot of effort, with practically no return.
Note also that GPUs unpack everything to 32-bit types, while AVX2 has many instructions which can operate on packed 16-bit and 8-bit types. This is particularly interesting for photo and video editing. Hence even if the CPU and GPU have the same GFLOPS rating, which is typically for 32-bit floating-point numbers, the CPU can outperform it.
So I'm afraid you're vastly overrating the benefit of GPGPU. It's not magically faster than what CPUs can do. And AVX has future potential to be extended up to 1024-bit!
Secondly, I actually give HSA and GPGPU more chance of surviving than I do Intel and AMD both. People aren't buying Intel products in droves and sales figures are actually slipping. AVX2 has benefits for certain crowds, but the whole of the market doesn't need more CPU throughput.
That's ridiculous. GPGPU is about trying to increase throughput, but when the CPU's throughput is increased that's suddenly not needed? It seems like you're using double standards.
There's a reason why PC sales are slipping and it's not to do with PCs not being fast enough.
There's an economic crisis, people are waiting for Windows 8, and games aren't pushing the limits because the new consoles haven't arrived yet. Each of these will change over time. Don't mistake it for a general decline.
Do you really think the same people buying tablets care about AVX2? A proprietary ISA attached to an overpriced processor tied to high power consumption and large form factors? Get real.
Again, it doesn't specifically have to be AVX2. All I'm saying is that the heterogeneous computing which AMD is pursuing is a dead end for the consumer market and they should instead be looking into homogeneous high throughput technology. And yes, something akin to AVX2 can be very desirable for tablets too. Having a wide SIMD instruction set with gather support allows to vectorize any loop with independent iterations, which are a bottleneck in lots of software. Vectorization lowers power consumption, so it's something that should interest the mobile market. There will be 10 Watt Haswell parts with full AVX2 support, and the next generation will no doubt be even more power efficient and be suitable for an even wider market.
As far as streamlining their product line, I think that's the only way AMD stands a chance of survival. Frankly, I think they're not going to survive 2013 if the current rumors are true -- delayed Kaveri and the 30% of their engineers on the chopping block.
They would have a chance of survival if they stopped wasting money on HSA. Unfortunately Rory's memo seems to make that unlikely.
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