fazers_on_stun
Splendid
Terry1212 :
Currently Intel. It's an up and down roller coaster though.
Well you might be interested to read THIS article:
I think the whole AMD fanboy movement started with the success of the Athlon. I bet most AMD fans never even heard of AMD before the Athlon, or in fact haven't even owned a PC before that time. That is the only way in which I can explain their delusional idea that Intel and AMD are somehow each other's equals in a technological sense, and how they leap-frog over each other, trading the performance crown back and forth.
Clearly, anyone who bothered to study the history since the beginning of Intel's 8086-range will know that AMD started as an independent seller of x86 processors with the Am386 [after having been a second source for Intel with the 8086 and 80286 for years], and that they did this in 1991. Put this in the proper perspective: Intel released the original 80386 in 1985(!), and released the 80486(!) in 1989. So from the get-go, AMD was about six years behind Intel, with a gap of more than a generation.
One often hears the fairytale that AMD sold much faster 486 derivatives than Intel, so AMD must have had a technological advantage over Intel. While it is true that AMD sold 486 derivatives up to 133 MHz, while Intel's fastest was only 100 MHz, this has to be put in the proper perspective as well: AMD's first Am486 was introduced in 1993, actually a month AFTER Intel had introduced the Pentium, which may not have had higher clockspeeds at the time, but the Pentium had far higher performance per cycle, especially the FPU was an incredible deal faster than the outdated design of the 487. In fact, AMD didn't actually introduce those 100+ MHz 486s until 1995, while Intel released its last 486 in 1994.
So what really happened was that AMD basically was selling overclocked 486 processors as their high-end, while Intel had a much more advanced architecture which delivered much better performance, even at considerably lower clockspeeds. Clearly Intel wasn't even interested in selling high clockspeed 486 processors, as they would only threaten Pentium sales. And of course AMD was still a generation behind technologically, so the fact that they eventually had a 133 MHz 486 in 1995 doesn't mean much. Intel offered 133 and 150 MHz versions of the Pentium by then. So not only could Intel match AMD's clockspeed, but Intel's processors were MUCH faster at those clocks. In fact, even if we look at the fastest processor that you can put on a 486 socket, it's not AMD's, it's still Intel's. Intel even offered a Pentium Overdrive processor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_OverDrive for the 486 socket [although not all motherboards could support it]. It was a true Pentium processor at 83 MHz, complete with the superscalar architecture with the U and V pipelines, the large caches and the massively improved FPU. I've actually used it in my home server for a few years, running FreeBSD.
That's pretty much the story of AMD all around. Usually their CPUs were a generation behind, and also their manufacturing process was usually one node behind that of Intel. In fact, the entire success of the Athlon architecture is partly due to them being a generation behind. While Intel moved on to the Pentium 4 aka Netburst architecture, AMD was still working with an architecture that was closely related to Intel's P6 architecture, as used in the Pentium Pro, Pentium II and Pentium III.
Netburst didn't quite work out, and as a result, Intel had never killed off their P6 architecture completely. They used it in the Pentium M line for mobile devices, as the Pentium 4 just drew too much power [even the Pentium 4M derivative was useful for desktop replacements at best]. Overclockers already knew it, and Intel must have known as well: If you overclock the Pentium M (or later the Core Duo), you get performance very similar to that of the high-end Athlons and Pentium 4s.