AMD is currently in $2billion worth of debt iirc. If they did go under, or even if they just pulled out of the cpu market to focus on the gpu market (they are doing considerably better with their gpus than with their cpus), what would the market be like? Just Intel (or nVidia) having a monopoly, charging whatever they want? Progress stagnating? Can we count on people wanting more and faster or maybe software improvements needing more power to constantly drive improvements even with a monopoly situation? For example, nVidia would need to continue to improve their gpus even without AMD around because games are still getting harder and harder to run. At least Intel's 2011 line would still need improvements every so often for content creators and the like.
Overall, I think it would be a really bad thing for AMD to disappear, and I wish they had more market share in the cpu department (though they would need competitive cpus for that to happen, and right now, they don't really have that for a lot of Intel's offerings).
What do you guys think? Should we pray to the hardware gods that AMD stays competitive or just be indifferent towards it?
P.s. I am not saying that I think they will go under. They seem to be stable. I am just wondering about worst case scenarios here.