Before I get into this week’s thought, let me emphasize the point I made last week regarding the importance of the O-Line as the foundation of the offense. I painfully sat through the entire Steelers vs. Eagles game this week and I can honestly say, I have never seen a worse offensive line performance as I did by the Steelers. Not only was Big Ben under constant attack by the Eagles defense, but the Eagles also held Fast Willie to a handful of meaningless yards. I have never seen an offensive line so overpowered and so confused as the Steelers looked. Of course it is not just the O-Line’s fault, but as the foundation, as they go so goes the Steelers offense. And based on last week’s post, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge a huge improvement this week by the Bengals O-Line in a tough OT loss to the Giants.

OK, onto my big Week 3 take away. If you would have told me that in Week 3, Kerry Collins, Gus Ferrotte and Brian Griese would have led the Titans, Vikings and Buccaneers to victory I would have told you that you were nuts. Now in an attempt to get the 0-3 Rams ship turned around, they are turning to 15-year veteran Trent Green.. These are guys who could just as easily be retired playing golf as playing football, never mind winning games in the NFL. Meanwhile some of the staples of the NFL quarterback ranks are having somewhat of a tough start. Peyton Manning looks like a rookie rather than a field general, Brett Favre has not even come close to living up to the NY hype and Derek Anderson’s poor play may in fact give Cleveland a reason to let Brady Quinn try and earn some of the millions they pay him.

Point here is, don’t too easily write off players who may have gone through a rough patch here and there, as they may be just what a certain situation requires. At the same time, teams need to be careful not to get so enamored with big name players that they lose perspective on what’s really important…WINNING. For example, I know it’s still early in the season, but it’s apparent to me already that Brett Favre is never going to live up to the expectations that the Jets, the NY fans or the media have set for him. The more interesting question is at what point this year (if ever) do the Jets swallow pride and pull Brett in lieu of a better option at QB (knowing the Jets I would say the answer is never).

Speaking of tough starts and rough patches, AMD had some challenges in bringing our Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor, also known as “Barcelona,” to market. And if you were to believe some of the lurid press reports during the past few months, you’d think AMD was on the verge of an early retirement. Yet, within the past year, Barcelona has become a leading performance and performance-per-watt solution for x86 servers across many of the workloads that are critical for enterprise customers today. Just as Collins, Ferrotte and Griese can still contribute and win at the highest level, the AMD Opteron processor remains a leader in the x86 server market. Also, let’s not lose sight of the fact AMD has only been playing in the server market for five years and over that short period of time, we have been able to deliver impressive improvements in performance and performance-per-watt.[1] We intend to continue this trend later this year with the planned launch of our 45nm “Shanghai” processor.

Substance and stability are the backbone of a good football team – not name and flash. The Titans could attest to that while admitting that paying nearly $60 million for a player doesn’t always equal success. Sometimes a good look under that surface will reveal that things may not be as great as they seem.

In the server world, I would suggest that hype is the exact thing you should avoid. Last time I checked a jingle or a guy with his face painted blue is not helping solving datacenter problems. Based on my conversations with customers, improved performance and functionality is critical for IT decision-makers, but equally important is stability and predictability. And Shanghai – without the hype – is being designed to deliver – in a big way – the performance and functionality enterprises need to win in their industries.

Please keep the comments coming – the good the bad and the ugly. One request I have gotten from several folks was to make some predictions on the upcoming week. Rather than predicting the obvious I thought I would give you a “Shoe-in”, an “Upset” and an “Industry” insight:

Shoe-In = Dallas at home easily over the Skins

Upset = Chiefs upset the Broncos for their first win

Insight = Technology and datacenters are a major purchase consideration amongst Wall St. firms looking to acquire one another

[1] In 2003, AMD introduced AMD Opteron™ with one-core (130nm) at 1.8GHz (89w) with no L3 cache.

In 2007, we introduced Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ with four-cores (65nm) at 2.30GHz (95w) with 2MB L3 cache and IPC improvements.