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Upside interviews Jerry Sanders of AMD
An Anonymous reader writes "Titled The Last Man Standing, this Upside interview offered an inside view of the bloody war between the two CPU makers from Sanders' point of view. He also talks about upcoming Hammer, flash memory, Transmeta and telecomm bubbles. Somehow I get a feeling that both companies are living under the heavy cloud of Microsoft. Pretty lengthy, but an interesting reading.""
When the K6 (K6-II, I believe) beat the Pentium-du-jour in some benchmarks, I first couldn't believe it (who had really heard of AMD at that time ?) then I thought
"OMG, there's gonna be blood spilled, and cheaper processors ! W00t !".
I'm glad today that competition drives both AMD and Intel to excel, and I enjoy watching their strategic moves: Athlon vs P[34], Hammer vs Itanium, it's like a boxing match from which the customer can only profit.
AMD vs Intel is a textbook example of healthy competition.
-- don't discount flying pigs until you have good air defense
Yes, Sanders is the bomb. He's an old school SOB who will tell you what he thinks of Intel's "fucking Pentium 4" in an interview. Would you have the balls to say that if you were in his shoes ?
This man has lead one of the greatest corporate fights in the history of this nation. AMD has had every reason to fail, as Cyrix, Transmedia, IDT (or whatever the WinChip guys were called), etc. Over the years the Intel blowhards have tried to put AMD in the same boat as those failed manufacturers. Most of them are still denying the fact that they called the K7 vaporware, and denied that it would rock the processor industry. Where are you naysayers now ? Would you have a 2 gHz Pentium 4 available if it weren't for AMD and the K7 ? Take the date of the Pentium III 450, add 50mhz for every 6 months since it came out, and tell me if you've reached 2.0 gHz yet, because that's what you would have had if the K7 wasn't there.
I'm not one of these fools who just roots for whoever is the underdog in any particular fight (Microsoft vs Linux, Intel vs AMD, etc). I find such lemming behavior offensive. Not that you shouldn't like them, but there should be a reason. We owe the past 3 years of breakneck processor development to AMD, both directly through their own products, and indirectly by forcing Intel to work for their money.
I don't even have to mention the pricing. Those of you out there who had to choose between a Pentium and a K5, you know how much Intel was overcharging.
Am I anti-Intel ? No. If Intel came out with a better product at a reasonable price, I would buy it. The Itanium is absolutely awesome from an architecural perspective. I am a consumer, I select the best product at the best price (in theory that's how consumers work, heh). AMD currently offers a product that beats Pentium 4s at equal clock speeds, and even at far higher clock speeds the P4 doesn't stand a chance. The P4 is awesome for applications specificly optimized for SSE2, but for everything else it's just empty mhz. The Athlon is faster, cheaper, and runs at a LOWER clock speed to achieve that performance. As long as that is true, AMD will have my support.