The Past and Present

A few years ago I wrote a State of the Industry mini-report, detailing where AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, 3dfx, Creative Labs and Aureal were going. Since then, two of those companies have ceased to exist and the scene has changed dramatically.

In the vein of Japanese car companies that started by providing low-cost alternatives to American cars, AMD cut itself a niche in the market in the same fashion. Its K6 line of processors were never the performers that Intel's Pentiums were, but AMD managed to milk them for all they were worth with 3DNow! SIMD extensions, and later an on-chip cache in the K6+3D. AMD subsisted on the K6 long enough to research, develop and put into production its Athlon.

The Athlon has been a breakthrough for AMD. For the first time in their history, they were able to deliver a superior platform ahead of Intel. Though the various incarnations of the Athlon have traded performance crowns back and forth with Intel's Pentium III and Pentium 4 line, there is no doubt of AMD's success.

Among us, the hardcore enthusiasts, AMD is the preferred choice at the moment. A recent poll on FiringSquad showed that 66% of all our readers who voted in the poll were running an Athlon processor, compared to only 34% who had an Intel chip. This is a huge swing in favor of AMD. Four years ago, in a similar poll the people who voted for AMD were slightly over 40% of our audience. Though this isn't a scientific poll, we can also look at the major computer OEMs and see that only Dell offers exclusively Intel hardware.

However, this article isn't about AMD's advances in the hardware arena. It's about the consequences of those advances.

AMD was the first of the two companies to announce, develop, and release a processor with 64-bit extensions to the x86 family. The company has also beaten Intel to the punch with an on-chip memory controller and rumors first started of Athlon 64 dual-core before any dual-core Intel chips. The Athlon's success has spawned a huge support infrastructure for the processor. Big questions upon its launch were "who will make chipsets and motherboards to support it?" We can all remember the first poor motherboards, but eventually the proper hardware materialized.

Intel's 64-bit processor shares most, but not all of AMD's 64-bit extensions. Intel's motherboards are now completely incompatible with AMD's, unlike in days past when a K6 and Pentium could share the same system. A few years ago, Intel experimented with Rambus RDRAM - ostensibly for greater performance but also because it would give Intel something AMD didn't have.