Alby_da_Wolf said:
Think again. Yes, AMD is currently almost always one or more steps behind Intel, but it doesn't stand still, and should Intel slow down, AMD would reach it, so even staying behind, AMD actually forces Intel to evolve fast to keep its lead. Without this even strongly asymmetrical competition, Intel could keep on selling overpriced crap like it did before AMD gathered all the engineers it could from other Intel competitors gone bankrupt and in a few years made great leaps from k5 to k6, k6-II, k6-III and finally its masterpiece, Athlon.
BTW Athlon would have deserved the leadership on desktops from 1999 to 2006, without PC producers and specialised journalists undeservedly favouring Intel in that period, AMD would be in a better shape and the race far more balanced.
Also, I wouldn't credit Intel too much for innovation, its fast growth started when with MS they managed to put their moles at HP, SGI, Compaq-DEC to kill the best selling Unix versions and RISC CPUs to clear the way to Win NT and Itanium. Despite the elimination of Alpha, the most powerful CPU of its times, Itanium eventually failed, as even Itanium 2 struggled to tie with older and cheaper Alpha CPUs, and Intel was forced to return to x86 derivatives also for high-end servers and workstations and cluster nodes, with the Xeon, but it managed to put its grubby paws on the unused newer DEC Alpha projects, buying them for far less than their true value (they had in their drawers, at various stages of development, the projects for several never released next generations of Alpha). We don't know how much of that know-how could be easily reused on CISC CPUs, but it's not casual that very few years after Intel development started an impressive acceleration.
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