As disappointing as the slide is, it may very well show what replaces the 8-core Vishera...another 8 core Vishera. If this slide holds true, I suspect that their recently announced FX9590 and FX9370 at 5GHz and 4.7GHz respectively will be their high-end offering through 2014, but we all hope that the slide won't hold true and that AMD will provide an 8-core Steamroller part.
Although Intel holds the patent for their own, awesome, fluxless solder process, I seriously doubt they will go back to it. They saved a lot of money by abandoning it and going with cheap TIM and it's all worked out for them for the most part. The only market they sacrificed are the enthusiast overclockers, which, unfortunately, make up an insignificant portion of the overall. And honestly, most enthusiasts will do what I would do and just delid the IHS, wipe that crap off, put some liquid metal alloy on there, relid and OC to the heart's content.
Oh stop it! :P AMD is still making high end CPU's. The FX8350 is very comparable to the 3770K in many applications, though it does suffer in a lot of games, which has given it a worse rap than it should have. However, in games that utilize as many cores as are available, it does quite well. And since almost every game developer from now on will be developing with AMD 8-core hardware in mind, it should only get better for these AMD FX 8-core parts, especially with a 20% boost in speed as we'll see with 5GHz FX9590. It won't be an Intel killer, but it should narrow the gap until they can come out with something better.
