The Rise and Fall of AMD

[ThunderRd]

From ARSTechnica:

The rise and fall of AMD: How an underdog stuck it to Intel | Ars Technica

[Daniel ~]

Very interesting and a bit scary...

[booman]

Wow, I had no idea of the history of AMD...
Kinda sad, but I still love their Processors!
I buy them because they are cheaper... I don't need a spectacular CPU for gaming. A decent 3-core does just fine!

But kinda sucks that they couldn't get their act together and pick up more of the market.

[TrevorS]

Quite a story! I have three Athlon 64 X2 PCs and remember well AMD's days of glory. My only Intels are early: my first PC (Tandy 1000TX 80286), my first serious PC (ZEOS tower 486/66), and a couple cast offs (Compaq Camaro Pentium 1 and Gemlight Pentium 1.33). Everything else I built myself using AMD processors, the socket 939 X2s being the last.

I was one of those rooting hard for AMD to maintain it's lead with the X2 series, despite my last purchase being a whopping $500 for a 4600+ (took serious stretching, but ultimately couldn't resist) and that wasn't the top dog -- I'm typing with that cpu right now. I've been out of the market since then, plenty of computing power lying around, but heard that the "Israeli innovated" Core Duo came stomping into town pulling the gamers back to Intel. Thought the Dresden fab announcement was a mark of AMD's realized success, but now I see it was purely over-extension -- darned shame.

Neighbor asked me about putting together a gamer recently and that got me looking into CPUs and motherboards only to discover AMD's in serious trouble and has been for awhile. Thanks to this article, I now know what happened even before my first K-6 purchase, apparently I've NexGen to thank for that.

I see today's performance CPU market is fully dominated by Intel and once again, AMD is the low cost dark-horse, no $500 cpus. I priced a very reasonable AMD FX4300 "Piledriver" with entry ATX Gigabyte MB and 2GB DDR3 (~$200 total) and it could probably double the video crunching performance of my 4600+. Appears "Steamroller" is the one to look for (hopefully QTR4), but if it appears, there'll probably be a price hike so "Piledriver" is very tempting -- would be my first new build in roughly ten years! So, I definitely hope AMD stays in the game and so enables low budget enthusiasts like myself to build affordable fire-breathing machines. It's much like the old days, can't afford Intel, but no need to as long as AMD stays in there !

[booman]

I have a feeling they will always be "in the game" for desktops.
Desktops will stick around because they are so affordable and resilient. Not to mention up-gradable.

I would LOVE to invest in a modern Intel CPU but there goes my $500 gaming machine!

[Daniel ~]

When I look at the power I have, then look at the power I actually use or need.... If it wasn't for F@H I'd "most likely" go to my grave without upgrading and still have more power than I'll EVER need...

[booman]

I really don't want to talk about the power you have...

[Daniel ~]

I understand...when you have more power than you need, it hurts to see even more power than you need in the hands of someone who can't not use it the way you could....":O}

[booman]

Thats pretty funny Daniel...