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fordy on 25 November 2010
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Jereel Hunter said:
fordy said:

Apparently you haven't been a gamer long enough to know that back in the mid '90s, Intel was the only way to go, and the 'cheap and nasty' sector was filled by the likes of AMD and Cyrix.

I have owned 1 AMD system. An AMD 133, which worked on a 486 DX4 board. It lasted two weeks. I have not looked back since.


"cheap and nasty" isn't accurate. Cyrix got a bad rap... Back in those days (slightly after, I guess) I had a 200mhz (maybe 233, can't remember, it was a long time ago) Cyrix system and it blew the doors off of my dad's computers. (All Intels)

Step forward to a few yeards later, in the days approaching 1ghz... Athlon benchmarks were bombing the P4's to the ground. It was no contest. They were cheaper AND faster.

Intel owned the marketshare, and they were in a position like Apple today. Not always the best products, but by far the best sales/reputation.

Then I must say that your dad's computers must have been poorly configured. My friends ran Cyrix processors and couldn't even get close to the same performance as my Pentium II 233MHz. Cyrix got everything they deserved.

NetBus was indeed a PR disaster on Intel's part, and that WAS the only time where they slipped in performance and let the competition move ahead in that area. That changed after they ditched the NetBus architecture and went with Performance per Watt. Then the Core (mobile processor btw) was belting the hell out of AMD's Desktop Athlons!