2010 will be a tough year for AMD. Intel was generous enough to save AMD and give it 1.25 billion for a bit of unfair competition and some patent claims, and it said that Globalfoundries and AMD are ok to keep using its x86 license.

This happened at a critical time for AMD, as the company just presented its 2010 roadmap that lacks any cutting edge products. In the desktop space will have the Thuban 6 core 45nm CPU and in Q2 2010 it will have a new Deneb core revision and that is about it.

AMD has high 45nm hopes for its mobile roadmap, but as of January Intel will ship 32nm chips almost a year ahead of AMD, if not even longer. The server roadmap looks ok for AMD, but Nehalem is definitely more dominant architecture and let's not forget Core i3, i5 and i7 are definitely faster than Phenom and Athlon chips.

AMD is struggling with its $3.2 billion debt and Intel’s generous $1.25 billion will definitely win back some investor confidence, but we believe that AMD is heading towards many negative quarters in 2010.

The sudden and quite unexpected news that Intel will give AMD $1.25 billion boosted AMD’s shares from $5.34 to $6.5 or more than 20 percent.

This kind of confirms our conspiracy theory that we shared with many industry insiders that Intel will find a way to save AMD from itself and bankruptcy. The reason behind is that without AMD, Intel would definitely be in a monopolist position and US and EU regulatory agencies don’t like that.

Keeping AMD alive until they get back on track with competitive products in 2011 is Dirk Meyer's new game.