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Intel: A Core New Low? AMD vs Intel article

@ 2006/02/14

While it is difficult to tell when Intel lost the initiative internally, it is not difficult to tell where it began losing it relative to the competition. That occurred in 1998, with AMD’s launch of the K6-2. Until the K6-2, AMD was at best able to offer some extra clock speed over Intel’s chips (remember the 486DX-40?) The K6-2 introduced “3DNow!”, a much-hyped technology which promised to address the K6’s poor floating point performance. With the K6, AMD had simply been caught flat-footed by the gaming market and the move to 3D. The original K6 design was actually superior to the Pentium in integer performance, clock-for-clock, and it was scaling better to boot.

Comment from Sidney @ 2006/02/15

To certain aspects, the K6-2 was better than what Intel could offer back in 1998. I too owned a laptop based on K6-2. The short fall of Intel today was three folded; 1) Pricing from 1998 to 2004, when the AXP gained younger audience acceptance from low pricing than P4, 2) Intel's failure to admit Hyper Transport efficiency and 3) Intel's failure to correc the excessive thermal loss issue.

It is only until the last 12 months Intel pricing is more in-line and at times lower than AMD. During this same period (1998 to 2004) AMD has demonstrated the innovations from a small company exceeding it's much bigger rival Intel with top company official feeling the all mighty stance.

The situation was greatly accelerated by PC enthusiasts who started hundred of hardware review websites; Toms Hardware did not get popular until the Intel PIII cultprit. The way I see it; AMD's success is certainly from it's innovation but owe the PC enthusiasts a big thanks in pushing the envelope for the low priced product effecting the graphic card and memory performance today.

And, that is my opinion.

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