I agree with you that this DOES need to be a co-ordinated effort. We have the
power we need to win over AMD, provided everybody who cares even in the
slightest for this puts in the time to make it known. The winds of change are
blowing, but it's up to us to ensure that it's clear what truly is at stake
here.
In regards to scepticism, I suspect there is something different this time to
before. Firstly, although Microsoft are by no means defeated yet, their power
has been waning with the rise of mobile and web-based 'cloud' platforms.
GNU/Linux has slowly been gaining traction, to the point where Microsoft must
at least appease the Ubuntu-lovers (although liberty is not quite on the
agenda, sadly). It's not clear any one company has the power to force
chipmakers' arms anymore, though there may still be some tricks they could
try.
More to the point, however, there is at the very least a vocal community of
'slacktivists' (and very possibly activists) within the hacker community. The
wall of text CalmStorm posted above is a comment posted to a Reddit Ryzen AMA
hosted by an AMD representative. It ended up being voted the top comment! The
representative then replied, where (in AMD's favor so far) most companies
would give the silent treatment, asking that we "believe [him] when [he] says
[it] has CEO level attention". A response-post, transcribed by Danish above,
further attracted a number of commenters putting money on the line if AMD
were willing to share with us. There is hope!
