Kaarme:

It would be funny to see them get 1.5 billion fines from the USA, Canada, the EU, China, Japan, India, Brazil, Australia, etc. Then it would start to affect even Intel.

It actually wasn't a fine paid to a government--100% of the money went straight to AMD as a part of the settlement it enacted with Intel to end the AMD anti-trust lawsuit against Intel. More importantly, also as a part of the settlement, Intel has agreed in writing to never again pull the stunt of paying OEMs (like Dell) to not sell AMD CPUs. It always bears repeating what a powerful competitor AMD is--Intel used every nasty trick in the book to add AMD to the long line of x86 wannabe cpu manufacturers who are now extinct, from pre-Athlon on up. Even though threatened by Intel with parts shortages and higher prices, the third-party motherboard vendors were resolute in supporting AMD's Athlon platform regardless, way back in 1999. They took a dim view of Intel's attempts to strong-arm them. These days Intel will have to compete on solely technical grounds as opposed to just throwing money around, as in the old days, plus AMD's top management is composed of technical people, not the pencil pushers who have taken over Intel by all appearances.

CPC_RedDawn:

. - a decent clockspeed increase to around 4GHz base and 4.5GHz boost (sorry I don't believe the rumours about 5GHz)

Not sure what is hard to believe about it. It's only logical for it to be expected to be near 5ghz. Otherwise you're saying that a fairly major node change and architecture change has about the same increase as the minor architecture change and minor node change from Zen to Zen+, and that's not logical. Obviously only time will tell but i prefer to base expectations on logical progression.