It's not so much free consulting as your potential customers saying "I like your product, but instead of buying it from you I'm going to ask the large company I'm used to dealing with if they can sell me something similar." Which actually happens a lot in business, not something exclusive to the computer industry. The way the new CEO has been speaking in public you can tell Intel is getting bombarded with "Where is your version of Snapdragon 800? Where is your version of these Kabini chips?"
Oh yeah, that happens too, no question there.
I'm just looking at it from the perspective of Intel which does hire loads of outside consultants to provide external feedback on everything under the sun...and since they are not above internalizing that external feedback they are also not going to be above internalizing the feedback made freely available by AMD when AMD makes stuff public.
I mean if AMD really did think that the future was fusion then why on earth did they tip of their competition to this years and years in advance of themselves being able to cash in on their vision?
Any sane business team would keep that kind of edge to themselves and only mention it when they were literally months away from rolling products out to the market.
But a consultant will talk about it for years and years in advance to as many people as are willing to pay them to talk about it...kinda like AMD only AMD doesn't charge for the free advice
That said, everyone needs to work with what they are great at...and if AMD's greatest strength is being a "big idea generator" the same as a consulting agency then they ought to stop trying to create their vision (and getting their ass kicked in the meantime) and instead become a for-profit consulting company.
If you are suited to be the best ball-point pen manufacturer in the world don't insist on trying to make automobiles, your products will suck and you won't cash in on your strengths either.
So is this how Intel meets their "not going all BGA in the forseeable future PR", stretch out desktop Haswell and perhaps after Haswell is too long in the tooth have a few Broadwell socket SKUs then kill off socketed all together?
I personally don't see the whole BGA thing going down like that. I see BGA being just another option for lowering the BOM of fully integrated devices like tablets and laptops as well as those all-in-one desktop deals where the LCD itself houses the innards of a regular desktop computer case.
That said, given the successful business model that the discrete GPU makers have built with their AIB partners, it certainly can be done and would not represent something unacceptable to the market or supplier chain.
Nobody expects their discrete GPU to be upgradable, and it wouldn't take too much in terms of time for people to find themselves being ok with buying a mobo that was also not CPU-upgradable.
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