Intel didn't beat AMD back in the day because they had a better processor. Intel relied on anti-competitive practices to lock AMD out of the desktop and server markets. They were successfully sued by AMD but the damage was done. Then Intel sat on it's laurels and quit innovating, slowly doling out incremental improvements through their 'tick-tock' release cycle. Intel dug their own hole and I have no sympathy for Intel while AMD buries them in it.
AMD blew Intel out of the water in every possible way, except sales. They had trouble selling chips to mainstream OEMs because the OEMs had questionably-legal deals with Intel that penalized them for buying processors from anyone else. In some cases AMD literally couldn't give them away. And in the long run that killed them - without the income they simply couldn't keep up.
AMD lost to intel a long time ago, for purely technical reasons. They had the upper hand circa 2002 or so, before intel trashed that line of development and launched the core duo platform.
Everyone should remember how Intel anti competitive behaviors had almost killed AMD. And it took a long time for AMD to recover after Intel was forced to stop doing that. But today, AMD is the innovative one and Intel forced to run to try to catch up. Still, a few other CPU manufacturers died on the way.
And the crazy thing is that, at an earlier time, a lot of idiots had supported Intel saying that their bad behavior was in the interest of consumers, and that it is thanks to that that they were able to provide innovation to the market...
When it comes to Intel, I am, and have been, so disgusted that they held back computing by about 6-10 years by consistently shipping overpriced, barely improved-upon quad-core processors that I:
1. Put nothing shitty past them.
2. Will never ever purchase their products again.
The real problem is the endless pursuit of profit though, instead of the pursuit of ever-advancing, ever-improving technological superiority, and sadly AMD isn't any better in this area I've come to see. The moment they conclusively, provably became better than Intel, they jacked up their price, even though their processors were using the same 7nm process that, at that point, was extremely reliable and had a 93% usable chip ratio.
So it turns out as soon as one company gains superiority they immediately become shitbags focused on money instead of focused on the advancement of technology and mankind. It puts anyone with a moralistic stance on what technology should be and how it should be implemented and distributed into a real pickle.
I was hoping that AMD would be the better company here, especially given they nearly died, but turns out they also are ready and willing to squander the goodwill of those of us who bought their chips not just when they were on the last legs, but also during their recovery period.
People really overstate Intel's woes. They got stuck on 14nm for ages, but were for all that time still the market leader. AMD has never comprehensively challenged them; only one segment at time is an AMD product better.
Intel lost their way after the Pentium Pro. Since then they've been a marketing and strategic financial weapon preventing advancement instead of seeking to make and profit off it.
Intel stagnated and at the same time started implementing some rather anti-consumer practices. This allowed AMD to take the performance lead off them with their latest generation of products. It’s fantastic that the market for processors is so competitive. I’ve grown to not like Intel very much recently, but I’m glad they’re here. They’ll keep the pressure on for further innovation, so AMD will either need to keep up or be overtaken again. Either of which is a good outcome for consumers.
From what I've seen Intel has not been nice to consumers or smart with their chips so far. For many years they just pumped the prices with mediocre processors because of their dominance. However, now the tables have turned and AMD is crushing them almost everywhere! I feel like they get what they deserve for being lazy and not innovating and we shouldn't reward that.
Do you honestly think that Intel is subject to "heavy competition" in the desktop CPU market?
They have exactly one competitor (AMD), and because Intel is so much bigger and has so much more money, they always have newer and better fabs. The only ways AMD can be competitive with Intel are to be really daringly clever with their chip design (Athlon 64, and hopefully the upcoming Bobcat and Bulldozer cores), sell their chips at lower profit margins, take advantage of Intel's mistakes (Itanic vs Athlon 64), and to pick their battles wisely (AMD has never been able to field a whole product lineup that is competitive across the board). The barriers of entry to that market are so high that even AMD can't fully surmount them, and AMD definitely can't gain ground or even maintain solvency by doing what Intel does but slightly better.
AMD have been thrashing Intel in performance, thermals and battery life for several years now. Intel are also a rather unpleasant company, I'll happily go with a competitor whenever it makes sense.
AMD beats Intel basically everywhere you need an x86-64 architecture. The latest CPUs beat Intel even on single core performance.
Intel is basically running a super legacy design and they are doing surprisingly well with it, but they are losing on all fronts at this time. What they have for them right now is momentum and enterprise deals.
That will hold up for a while yet, so it gives them time to get their act together.
AMD gave Intel a run for their money in the early naughts. Their chipset designs were inferior to Intel's but they had great CPUs. But then Intel took a page from HyperTransport (QPI) and AMD64 (IA64/x86_64) and released far superior parts with the Core and Xeon brands.
If there was a monopoly over the last decade it was only because AMD wasn't producing a competitive offering. It was not because of marketplace abuses like Intel's been accused of in the past.
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