If you were alive during the 90s or 2000s, you surely remember that tune. It’s the anthem of Intel, the world’s most dominant chip maker, or at least, they were. Since then, Intel has had a pretty rough fall from glory. In fact, today, Intel barely ranks in the top 10 when it comes to the world’s largest chip makers. They come in behind Nvidia, TSMC, Broadcom, Samsung, ASML, AMD, Qualcomm, Applied Materials, and Texas Instruments.And when you contextualize this with Nvidia’s performance, things
Admired AMD since the first Athlon, but never made the jump for various reasons–mostly availability. Just bought my first laptop(or any computer) with an AMD chip in it last year, a ryzen7 680m. There is no discrete graphics card and the onboard GPU has comparable performance to a discrete Nvidia 1050gpu. In a 13" laptop. The AMD chip far surpassed Intel’s onboard GPU performance, and Intel laptop was ~30% more from any company. Fuck right off.
Why doesn’t this matter to Intel? Part of why they always held mind space and a near monopoly is their OEM computer maker deals. HP, DELL, etc. it was almost impossible to find an AMD premade desktop, laptops were out of the question.
I believe my first amd was a desktop athlon around 2000. I needed a fast machine to crunch my undergraduate thesis and that was the most cost effective.
In recent years I can’t buy amd for a strong desktop, went with xps and there’s no options. Linux is a requirement for me, so it narrowed down my choices a lot. As you’d expect, it’s a horrible battery life compounded by being forced to pay and not choose an NVIDIA card that also has poor drivers and power management.
x86 and it’s successor amd86 instruction set is a Pandora box and a polished turd, hiding things such as micro instructions, a full blown small OS running in parallel and independent of BIOS, and other nefarious bad practices of over engineering that is at the roots of spectre and meltdown.
What I mean is I prefer AMD over Intel, but I prefer riscv over both.