Suddenly, It's AMD Inside

Yahoo ^ | SEPTEMBER 20, 2004 (News From the Future!) | By Cliff Edwards in Sunnyvale, Calif.

[BenLurkin]

For 35 years, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD ) stood in the shadow of archrival Intel Corp. (INTC ) AMD churned out lower-priced clones of the tech leader's chips and occasionally enjoyed a hit that helped boost its meager profits.

But bad times easily outweighed the good. Again and again, Intel used its manufacturing muscle and pricing power to stymie AMD's ambitions, preventing it from gaining a foothold in lucrative markets such as servers and corporate PCs.

Wave goodbye to the great imitator. In what may prove to be an historic reversal of fortune, AMD Chief Executive Hector de Jesus Ruiz has grabbed the momentum from his giant rival in recent months and left Intel scrambling to catch up. The perennial underdog was first to market by more than a year with a new class of microprocessors that's proving extremely popular with corporate clients.

It has smoothly launched new manufacturing techniques, while Intel has been plagued with an uncharacteristic string of delays, glitches, and recalls. And it pushed forward so aggressively with a new "multiple core" chip design, which squeezes several processors on one chip, that Intel was forced to speed up its own transition on some chips by as much as two years.

In a humbling moment, Intel executives announced the acceleration at the Intel Developer Forum on Sept. 7, a week after AMD showed off a working version of its own multiple core processors. "We've had some fumbles," says Intel President Paul S. Otellini.

[BenLurkin]

SEPTEMBER 20, 2004 (News From the Future!)

[Boundless]

And it doesn't seem likely that Intel will catch up soon.

Having no plans to put 64-bit on ordinary desktop PCs,
Intel has said that nobody needs it (sorry, Intel, I
could use it right now).

Finding themselves behind in performance, they've made
statements that performance no longer matters.

Seeing AMD demo dual-core first, Intel said recently
"This isn't a horse race."

Intel can still catch up, but it presently appears that
it will take 18 months to do it. Intel will still command
higher market share, because AMD can't produce enough
volume. And AMD, unlike Intel, cannot afford to make any
mistakes.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

AMD chips were always better than Intel's. Even back when they made the Duron processor it ran circles around the Pentium Celeron and III.

[doodad]

Built my first AMD computer this year. No problems, price was right. Runs hotter than Intel though so longevity may be an issue. Was thinking about dabbling with water cooling to combat the problem especially when playing Battlefield.

[boris]

The problem is compatibility. When I was developing in ASM, I dared not use AMD processors. I wrote to the standard. Period. And that habit has persisted.

A little story: one of my users was having a bug I could not duplicate. This was when math co-processors were on separate chips from the main CPU. I visited his site, confirmed the problem, opened his box and found an Intel CPU with an AMD co-processor. Went out and bought "genuine intel" co-processor, made the swap--and the bug went away.

A cautionary tale. I **STILL** cannot be 100% certain that an AMD chip will perform identically to the standard; hence I will neither use nor recommend them.

Compatibility is all.

--Boris