The thing that's sad is that if Intel hadn't taken so many unethical approaches to keeping AMD down when it actually was competitive with Intel on performance, the market could look totally different today. Back in the Athlon XP and early Athlon 64 days AMD was routinely ahead in benchmarks as well as power consumption, while P4 blustered along with higher and higher clock speeds. If they had gotten the market share their performance "deserved" (in some abstract sense, of course), they could have put more money into R&D and developed better follow on products. Instead, their market share grew only slowly, and eventually when Intel got back to improving performance AMD just fell behind and never recovered.
Intel's engineering prowess has to be respected, but how they got there by abusing their market position is deplorable. At this point I don't think there is any rational reason to buy AMD at any price point, they've been dominated so hard. (Buying ATI may not have helped, but these days that's the only part of AMD that's even still competitive.)
Intel's engineering prowess has to be respected, but how they got there by abusing their market position is deplorable. At this point I don't think there is any rational reason to buy AMD at any price point, they've been dominated so hard. (Buying ATI may not have helped, but these days that's the only part of AMD that's even still competitive.)