Quote:
Originally Posted by Traditional_Ale
Didn't AMD start as a company that cloned Intel chips, but then about ten years ago it started being the other way around (AMD engineering and Intel cloning)?
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Kind of....
They were in the semi-conductor business making memory and some other types of processors, and when Intel had pretty much established the x86 market, AMD (and Cyrix, et al) decided to reverse engineer the chips and get into the market.
Which, of course, triggered lawsuits, and so on.
Intel hasn't cloned, at least that I am aware of.
Each company has tried to put extensions onto the instruction set to make their offering a bit better. The ones that seem to be accepted and used are eventually incorporated by the competition to allow compatibility.
So the way I saw it (at least as far as teh desktop market goes) was:
Intel was king after Apple became marginalized in the 80s.
Some other manufacturers jump on the bandwagon and create clones.
Clones struggle because of compatibility issue, but some hang on.
Eventually it comes down to Intel and AMD, both are compatible, but Intel has better performance and AMD has lower prices.
To keep the lead, Intel makes their chips faster and faster (Pentium I, II,III,IV).
AMD comes up with a design that does the same amount of work in less time (Athlon).
AMD leverages their better memory bus by releasing dual core chips.
Intel watches their market share start to erode as AMD becomes a viable alternative to the mass market.
Intel releases dual core Pentiums, but they are hot and power hungry.
Just as AMD is making money, Intel changes gears with the Pentium M, which is created as a low power processor for notebook computers.
The Pentium M then becomes the Core Duo, then that evolved into the Core 2 Duo. Lower power like AMD's offerings, but even better performance.
AMD tries to answer with Phenom, but this has been underwhelming, with frequent delays and then issues with the first batches.
That is where we are now. Intel leading on performance with some attractive pricing, AMD can't compete on performance, so are losing money trying to compete on price - just like 10 years ago.
It looks like Intel should be able to keep the lead in the foreseeable future, but who knows if AMD can pull another rabbit from their hat.