Semiconductor industry is facing lot of challenges. Profitability is the main concern. Five years from now there will not be any AMD. I am not against AMD. TI, AMD,NXP,ST,Freescale etc all these companies design great chips but make very less money, infact most of them loss making. As we moved down to 90nm the production cost is steeply increasing, too much competition. Microprocessors is the only product category where competition is less and hence Intel is making good money. There are too many companies small and big making rest of the ICs and the competion there is severe which leads to more aggresive price reduction and hence less/no profitability. In future many spin-offs, aquisions, merger, closure will happen. Only biggies will servive.