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The Ups and Downs of AMD (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: In 2003 AMD was on top of the world. Now they're not, but they're also still in business. AMD continues to produce inexpensive, well-engineered semiconductors. The fall over the last 10 years is due to Intel, who used illegal practices and ethically questionable engineering decisions to knock AMD off their roost while still keeping them in business. The latter prevents the finger of antitrust from being pointed at Intel the way it was for Ma Bell.
Great CPU's and chipsets to match, so-so video cards..
AMD does must fine if you ask me, but they are NOT Intel who along with Micro$oft have colluded to keep each other on top of their prospective heaps. Yea, Intel keeps them alive on purpose, but don't sell AMD short, they can and have been doing solid work in spite of their reputation for being second best.
Personally I love AMD's CPU and chipset offerings for PCs. They are usually cheaper at the same performance point and are a great value. Yes, they are pushing the limits of the technology, running hotter and faster than Intel offerings, but for your average PC it doesn't matter. AMD CPU's rock along just fine and as long as you don't aggressively over clock, usually last long enough to go obsolete before they die.
Now the video hardware is a different story. They are still the cheaper for the same performance so they have great value, but for some reason their offerings are not as well supported and stable as ATI, so I generally find myself happier with that vendor. Like the CPUs, you can over clock the hardware and not kill it if you are not aggressive, but it seems the firmware/drivers/software isn't nearly as stable as it could be.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Its easy for everyone to ignore AMD and their own faults and focus on intel or nvidia as sole reason. Fact is AMD has done a lot of it to themselves. As said in another post on this story, they have did a lot of things wrong from drivers for their hardware being lack luster, to cpu's that are slow compared to intel and use a lot more power, to just straight up lies in benchmarks claiming they are as fast as the competition. Most those benchmarks they use are ones that are gpu accelerated which they have big advantage in vs intel atm.